India is a country characterized by a huge informal sector. At the same time, it is a country where the extent of corruption in every sector is remarkably high. Stifling bureaucratic interference and corruption at every stage of economic activities is one of the main reasons behind high...

Immigrant workers and their labor force participation in host countries have received critical attention in all concerned disciplines, principally owing to its strong implications for well-being of natives. The aging population in many rich countries and several related and unrelated issues...

Religious and ethnic minorities across the world face partisan treatment with regard to provision of public goods, either as outcome of discriminatory practices or due to historical antecedents, such as the caste and religious divides in India. In several districts of West Bengal in India...

We provide an analysis of enforcement policies applicable to formal sector in dual labor markets. We use a framework with heterogeneous firms, endogenous determination of informal wage and politically dictated enforcement strategies. Firms which operate both in the formal and informal sectors do...

This paper tries to document the presence of unreported income among public sector employees in India. We investigate empirically the wage gap as well as consumption expenditure parity between public and private sector workers. It tests the hypothesis that despite a lower level of public sector...

A number of recent studies for Latin America show that as the size of the informal economy grows, corruption is less harmful to inequality. We investigate if this relationship is equally compelling for developing countries in Asia where corruption, inequality and shadow economies are...

Rent seeking within the vast informal segment of the developing world is a relatively underdexplored topic in the interface of labor market policies and public economics. Moreover, how rent seeking and corruption within the informal segment is affected by economic reforms targeted for the formal...

Does higher educational attainment lead to greater participation in self-employment? Available studies agree and disagree on this subject through various explanations. We invoke an empirical example from the experiences of immigrants moving from poor countries to rich countries. Further, we...

One of the well-known barriers to development is persistence of disadvantage among communities. The lack of occupational and therefore upward social mobility continues to restrain households from achieving socially desirable outcomes. This paper studies the effect of short-term internal...

Many countries in the developed world are ageing in terms of their distribution of population. Conversely, a number of countries in the south have younger population. India for example, has 60% of its population in the age group of 15-59, with the mean age close to 27 years as of present times....