The role of a person's group identity and sense of integration into society as a determinant of the person's productivity and capability has been vastly underestimated in the literature. We talk of policies to subsidize the poor and give direct support to alleviate poverty. These are important...

Much of game theory is founded on the assumption that individual players are endowed with preferences that can be represented by a real-valued utility function. However, in reality human preferences are often not transitive. This is especially true for the indifference relation, which can lead...

The"tapering talk"starting on May 22, 2013, when Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke first spoke of the possibility of the U.S. central bank reducing its security purchases, had a sharp negative impact on emerging markets. India was among those hardest hit. The rupee depreciated by 18 percent...

The method of randomisation has been a major driver in the recent rise to prominence of empirical development economics. It has helped uncover patterns and facts that had earlier escaped attention. But it has also given rise to debate and controversy. This paper evaluates the method of...

The paper puts forward a small but novel idea of how we can cut down the incidence of bribery. There are different kinds of bribes and what this paper is concerned with are bribes that people often have to give to get what they are legally entitled to. I shall call these ― “harassment...

We consider a model of 'tenancy rent control' where landlords are not allowed to raise the rent on sitting tenants nor to evict them, though they are free to set the nominal rent when taking on a new tenant. If there is any inflation in the economy, landlords prefer to take shortstaying tenants....

A popular form of action to curb child labor and uphold international labor standards in general is a product boycott by consumers. There are labeling agencies that inform us if, for instance, a carpet or a hand-stitched soccer ball is free of child labor. The presence of a consumer boycott will...

A definition of a utilitarian social welfare relation (SWR) for infinite utility streams is proposed. Such a relation is characterized in terms of the Pareto, Anonymity and Partial Unit Comparability Axioms. The merits of the utilitarian SWR, relative to the more restrictive SWR induced by the...