We investigate the relationship between growth and deprivation in India, an issue of immense interest. Given the continuing controversy in India over poverty lines, we use a framework that rigorously assesses the impact of growth on the poor over a range of poverty lines. Using National sample...

Using data from the India Human Development Survey (IHDS) 2005, we examine intergenerational occupational mobility in India, an issue on which very few systematic and rigorous studies exist. We group individuals into classes and document patterns of mobility at the rural, urban and all-India...

We develop a measure of unemployment that takes into account both the level and intensity of unemployment and that satisfies several desirable properties, including distribution sensitivity (dealing with differences among the unemployed). It can also be decomposed into mean and distributional...

I present a review and extended discussion of The Cult of Statistical Significance: How the Standard Error Costs Us Jobs, Justice and Lives by Deirdre McCloskey and Stephen Ziliak, a work that raises important issues related to the practice of statistics and that has been widely commented upon....

Is the poor human capital investment by rural Indian families primarily a supply side or a demand side issue? We examine school attendance and total human capital investment time (time in school plus travel time plus in-home instructional time) using the Indian Time Use Survey of 1998-1999 and...

We analyze polarization in India roughly in the past two and half decades using consumption expenditure data. We show that polarization has increased sharply since the 1990s, reversing the earlier trend. On multidimensional polarization, we show that several pre-existing cleavages (caste,...

This paper formalizes ideas from classical and radical political economy on task allocation and technology adoption under capitalism. A few previous studies have attempted this, but the framework and results in this paper are different. I model labor contracts that are incomplete owing to...