In response to the problems of high coordination costs among the poor, efforts are underway in many countries to organize the poor through "self-help groups" (SHGs) -- membership-based organizations that aim to promote social cohesion through a mixture of education, access to finance, and...

Nearly one billion people worldwide live in rural areas without access to the paved road network. This paper measures the impacts of India's $40 billion national rural road construction program using regression discontinuity and data covering every individual and firm in rural India. The main...

This paper explores the links between city competitiveness and air pollution and the business environment. Because competitive cities not only attract more productive firms, but also facilitate their business, the paper look at firm performance as a proxy for city competitiveness. It focuses on...

Scholars have often argued that crime deters growth, but the empirical literature assessing such effect is scarce. By exploiting cross-municipality income and crime data for Mexico -- a country that experienced a high increase in crime rates over the past decade -- this study circumvents two of...

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...