The Indian states have been the standard unit of analysis for research on India that uses official data sources. For many empirical questions, states are a natural starting point because state governments set political agendas and budgets and administer a wide range of services. In addition, the...

This paper makes an attempt to incorporate benets from unpaid public services into consumption decisions to arrive at more accurate measures of poverty and inequality. The analysis is based on primary data collected from 40 villages in Bihar in 2012. Three types of public services are...

The importance of Total Factor Productivity (TFP) in explaining output changes is widely accepted, yet its sources are not well understood. We use a proprietary data set on the floor-level operations at the Bhilai Rail and Structural Mill (RSM) in India to understand the determinants of changes...

This paper examines the extent to which income differences across the racial groups can account for observed residential segregation. The authors adopt an approach to the decomposition of segregation measures that combines the method of indirect standardization with the idea that some degree of...

In this paper they show how an optimization algorithm can be used to approximately quantify the costs to users of spatial misallocation in centrally provided public goods. This method can be employed to evaluate the large programs of public good construction that have been central features of...

Most high and middle-income countries showed symptoms of skill-biased technological change in the 1980s. India — a low income country — did not, perhaps because India's traditionally controlled economy may have limited the transfer of technologies from abroad. However the economy underwent a...

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...

This paper explores the manner in which race and income interact to determine patterns of residential location in metropolitan areas. We use a framework in which individuals care about both the level of affluence and the racial composition of their communities, and in which there are differences...

This paper focuses on the relationship between public action and access to public goods. It begins by developing a simple model of collective action which is intended to capture the various mechanisms that are discussed in the theoretical literature on collective action. We argue that several of...