Although the concept of randomized assignment to control for extraneous factors reaches back hundreds of years, the first empirical use appears to have been in an 1835 trial of homeopathic medicine. Throughout the 19th century, there was primarily a growing awareness of the need for careful...

A large national farm panel from India covering a quarter century (1982, 1999, and 2008) is used to show that the inverse farm size-yield relationship weakened significantly over time, despite an increase in the dispersion of farm sizes. Key reasons are substitution of capital for labor in...

This paper examine asymmetric information about migrant earnings and its implications for remittance behavior using a sample of Indian households with husbands working overseas in Qatar. On average, wives underreport their husbands? income and underreporting is more prevalent in households with...

The effects of public investments aimed at directly improving children's health are theoretically ambiguous, since the outcomes also depend on indirect effects through parental inputs. The authors investigate the role of such inputs in influencing the incidence of child health gains from access...

In standard economics, individuals are rational actors and economic forces undermine institutions that impose large inefficiencies. The persistence of the caste system is evidence of the need for psychologically more realistic models of decision-making in economics. The caste system divides...

This paper presents the results of an investigation of selected census towns in northern India. Census towns are settlements that India's census classifies as urban although they continue to be governed as rural settlements. The 2011 census featured a remarkable increase in the number of census...

This paper estimates the welfare impact of rural electrification in India using nationally representative household panel survey data for 2005 and 2012. Analysis based on a propensity-score-weighted fixed-effects model finds that while electrification is associated with a broad range of social...

This paper analyzes analyze the impact of deregulatory reforms in India during the 1990s, which eliminated compulsory industrial licensing, on manufacturing firms' investment decisions. The paper finds an economically and statistically significant positive effect of delicensing on investment. It...

Experiments in the United States have found that pairs of individuals are generally able to form socially efficient conventions in coordination games of common interest in a remarkably short time. This paper shows that this ability is not universal. The paper reports the results of a field...

This paper studies the labor supply of South Indian boat owners using daily labor participation decisions of 249 boat owners during seven years. It tests the standard neoclassical model of labor supply, which predicts that (i) individuals should be more likely to work when earnings are...