Inequality between world citizens in mid-19th century was such that at least a half of it could be explained by income differences between workers and capital-owners in individual countries. Real income of workers in most countries was similar and low. This was the basis on which Marxism built...

Is inequality largely the result of the Industrial Revolution? Or, were pre-industrial incomes and life expectancies as unequal as they are today? For want of sufficient data, these questions have not yet been answered. This paper infers inequality for 14 ancient, pre-industrial societies using...

This paper compares the intergenerational mobility of educational and occupational attainment of men from disadvantaged groups (Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST)) in India with the intergenerational mobility of men outside these groups during 1983-2009. Although there has been a...

This paper offers a comprehensive analysis of poverty in India. It shows that no matter which of the two official poverty lines is used, poverty has declined steadily in all states and for all social and religious groups. Accelerated growth between fiscal years 2004-2005 and 2009-2010 led to an...

It is typically assumed that being hard-working or clever is a trait of the person, in the sense that it is always there, in a fixed manner. However, in an experiment with almost 600 boys in India, cues to one's place in the traditional caste order turn out to influence the expression of these...

Middle class values have long been perceived as drivers of social cohesion and growth. This paper investigates the relation between class (measured by position in the income distribution), values, and political orientations using comparable values surveys for six Latin American countries. The...

Economists have traditionally treated preferences as exogenously given. Preferences are assumed to be influenced by neither beliefs nor the constraints people face. As a consequence, changes in behaviour are explained exclusively in terms of changes in the set of feasible alternatives. Here the...

Can communal heterogeneity explain persistent educational inequities in developing countries? The paper uses a novel data-set from rural Pakistan that explicitly recognizes the geographic structure of villages and the social makeup of constituent hamlets to show that demand for schooling is...

Standard approaches to decomposing how much group differences contribute to inequality rarely show significant between-group inequality, and are of limited use in comparing populations with different numbers of groups. This study applies an adaptation to the standard approach that remedies these...

This paper describes the design of a multi-stage stratified sample for the Bangladesh Household Income and Expenditure Survey 2016/17. This survey instrument will be used by the Government of Bangladesh to estimate reliable poverty and welfare statistics at three different levels: (i) annual...