India's rural roads program, Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana, aims to draw villagers into the mainstream by improving not only their terms of trade, but also their educational attainments and health. Treating each all-weather feeder road as an isolated element within the larger network, and...

All-weather rural roads usually improve not only villagers' terms of trade, but also their educational attainments and health. Obtaining empirical estimates of the benefits generated by the first is straightforward, not so those generated by the others. The object of this paper is to estimate...

This paper analyzes the effects of all-weather rural roads on households' net output prices, education and health in a poor, drought-prone region of India. Of 30 villages originally surveyed in 2001-02, when two had such roads, a further nine received them between January 2007 and December 2009...

The object of this essay is to describe and analyse contractual relations in two villages in North-east Bihar at a time when the so-called ‘green revolution’ promised much and the region had just started to benefit from canal irrigation. It is against this historical background that I will...

This paper investigates the effects of an income guarantee on borrowing to smooth consumption and finance cultivation in a risky setting with marked seasonality. A three-season, infinite-horizon theoretical model is developed and analyzed. The insights yielded by the model are then used to...

This paper investigates the effects of India’s rural roads program (PMGSY) on morbidity, using data on 279 households drawn from 30 villages in a region of upland Orissa. The households were surveyed in 2010 and 2013, yielding an unbalanced panel of 1580 individuals, 1076 of whom were present...