Many popular social programs have limited coverage among households at the very bottom of the income and wealth distribution. If a program reaches the poor, but neglects the destitute, the (pre-program) income distribution of participants and non-participants will cross. We are interested in the...

Voters in India are often perceived as being biased in favor of parties that claim to represent their caste. We incorporate this caste bias into voter preferences and examine its influence on the distributive policies and corruption practices of the two major political parties in the North...

Since the late 1970s, the price indices underlying the poverty lines in India have been updated using aggregate indices. Widespread criticism of these indices led to the adoption of a new official methodology in 2011 based on unit values from con- sumption survey data. We propose an alternative...

Microfinance groups often engage in a variety of collective activities not directly related to credit. Groups can sanction members who default on their loans by excluding them from these activities. Our experiment is designed to explore the effectiveness of such sanctions in improving repayment...

Group loans with joint liability have been a distinguishing feature of many micronance programs. While such lending has benetted millions of borrowers, major lending insti- tutions have acknowledged their limited impact among the very poor and have recently favored individual contracts. This...

We study the distribution of food aid in Ethiopia between 1994 and 2004 using data from the Ethiopian Rural Household Survey. Over this period village leaders had considerable discretion in disbursing aid subject to official guidelines and periodic monitoring. We use a principal-agent model and...

The importance of Total Factor Productivity (TFP) in explaining output changes is widely accepted, yet its sources are not well understood. We use a proprietary data set on the oor-level operations at the Bhilai Rail and Structural Mill (RSM) in India to understand the determinants of changes in...

We show how an optimization algorithm can be used to approximately quan-tify the costs to users of spatial misallocation in centrally provided public goods. This method can be employed to evaluate the large programs of public good construction that have been central features of economic plans in...

The Indian states have been the standard unit of analysis for research on India that uses official data sources. For many empirical questions, states are a natural starting point because state governments set political agendas and budgets and administer a wide range of services. In addition, the...

Disadvantage is a popular and controversial word in India these days. In October 2007, half a million Gujars, traditionally a pastoral community of north and central India, filled the streets of several towns in the Indian state of Rajasthan demanding that they be classified by their state...