This paper examines the hypothesis that contraceptive use of illiterate women having literate partners (proximate literates), may be higher than that of illiterate women whose partners too are illiterates (isolate illiterates) using Demographic Health Survey data for India (2005-2006). Results...

Election results are generally hard to predict, and India is no exception. This paper discusses the factors that are important in explaining the results of the 2009 parliamentary elections in India. Our results show that the voters prefer the candidates who have served in the parliament before,...

Literature on family planning considers natural (also called traditional) contraceptives to be ‘ineffective’ because its users are not motivated to control their fertility. While this is true for initial stages of fertility transition, studies have reported that it is women belonging to...

This paper examines the response of voters to candidates who have reported that they have criminal charges against them, within the framework of a simple analytical model which assumes that criminal charges give rise to some stigma amongst the electorate, and result in a negative effect on vote...

Becker’s analysis of crime and punishment has initiated a series of theoretical and empirical works investigating the determinants of crime. However, there is a dearth of literature in the context of developing countries. This paper is an attempt to address this deficiency. The paper...

With the exception Brander and Drazen (2008), who use a comprehensive cross-country database consisting of both developed and developing countries, the hypothesis that rapid growth helps incumbents win elections has been tested exclusively for the developed countries (e.g., Ray Fair 1978). But...

While many developing countries have reformed their financial systems over the last few decades, how an increased level of financial liberalization affects the saving-investment relationship remains unclear. This paper examines the dynamic relationship between the domestic saving and investment...

This paper attempts to shed some light on the role of financial sector policies in generating new knowledge, drawing on the experience of one of the fastest growing and largest developing countries. Using relatively long time series data, the results in this paper indicate that interest rate...

The main objective of this paper is to explore the impact of financial sector reforms, financial deepening and intellectual property protection on the accumulation of knowledge for one of the world’s largest developing countries. The findings indicate that increased intellectual property...

In this paper, we provide a comparative account of the evolution of private saving in India and Malaysia, and analyze how policy changes in the financial sectors and pension systems help explain differences in their saving performance. Using the ARDL bounds estimation procedure, we find a fairly...