Since the late 1970s, the price indices underlying the poverty lines in India have been updated using aggregate indices. Widespread criticism of these indices led to the adoption of a new official methodology in 2011 based on unit values from consumption survey data. We propose an alternative...

It is well known that people’s consumption patterns change with income. Relative price changes therefore affect rich and poor consumers differently. Yet, the standard price indices are not income-specific and hence, the use of these mask these differences in cost-of-living. In this paper, we...

Coordination in collective wage setting can constrain potential monopoly gains to unions in non-traded-goods industries. Countries with national wage coordination can thus stabilize overall employment against fluctuations and shocks in the world economy. We test this theory by exploring...

Violence against women is persisting in many parts of the world. At the same time, there is a global trend of increased female labour force participation. In this paper we study the effect on intimate partner violence of a large public work program in India that explicitly encourages female...

Montero (2022) explores a discontinuity in a land reform in El Salvador and reports two main findings. First, relative to outside-owned haciendas operated by contract workers, the productivity of worker-owned cooperatives is higher for staple crops and lower for cash-crop. Second, cooperative...

This study pushes our understanding of research reliability by reproducing and replicating claims from 110 papers in leading economic and political science journals. The analysis involves computational reproducibility checks and robustness assessments. It reveals several patterns. First, we...

We argue that economic inequality harms social provisions for the poor, but that higher political competition can mitigate this effect. We test this hypothesis using a large redistricting of electoral boundaries in India and find that higher inequality causes more post-neonatal infant deaths,...

Have recent trends in globalization changed the positive link between trade openness and social insurance? The consensus view - that voters want better social insurance against income loss the more open the economy - is seemingly contested by the rise of populism and the China shock. We present...

We use a proprietary data set on the floor-level operations at the Bhilai Rail and Structural Mill (RSM) in India to understand how output rose sharply in response to competitive pressures. Output increases came predominantly from reductions in production delays of various kinds. We model...

In recent years, microfinance institutions have expanded into group lending with individual liability, leaving out the joint liability clause which was an important feature in earlier lending contracts. Recent experimental evidence indicates that group lending may yield benefits, specifically...