Given that India's urban areas contribute to nearly two-thirds of its gross domestic product, even though they account for only 31% of the country's population, they have been rightly called the engines of India's growth. In this paper, I answer the following questions: What are the economic...

This paper examines changes in regional inequality in India in the 1990s, using data for 210 of India's districts, spread across nine states. It provides a finer-grained quantitative analysis of growth patterns than has hitherto been attempted for India. The methodology is that of cross-section...

Urbanization has both benefits and costs. In a market economy, the trade-off between benefits and costs determines the level, speed, and pace of urbanization. This paper summarizes research findings on how urbanization enhances productivity and economic growth in both rural and urban sectors,...

In this paper we explore how satellite images of global night lights from the years 2001 to 2007 can be used to estimate economic activity at the sub-regional level in the U.S., India and China. The night lights based estimates of economic activity are then spatially analyzed and compared with...

This paper uses a general equilibrium trade framework to estimate the contribution of transport infrastructure to regional development. I apply the analysis to India, a country with a notoriously weak and congested transportation infrastructure. I first analyze the development effects of a...

Several studies have been carried out relating nighttime lights with economic activity. But most studies relating nighttime lights with economic activity have focused on associating higher totals in economic activity with higher sum of lights across regions. The question addressed in this paper...

Housing rents are a major part of a slum household’s expenditure.I exploit a large scale ’big-push’ national urban renewal policyreform in India between 2005 and 2012 to empirically evaluate themulti-dimensional effect of rental reforms and housing provisions onhome ownership, rental...

This paper demonstrates that India’s early 2000s mobile phone service expansion, or the “telecom boom” led to net rural-urban migration of about 13 million individuals out of which 4 million moved for employment. To estimate the effects, we exploit the heterogeneous expansion of telecom...

This paper examines changes in regional inequality in India in the 1990s, using data for 59 of India's 78 agro-climatic regions from the National Sample Survey. It extends the work of Singh et al. (2003) in two ways. First, it allows for differences in baseline growth performance across...

Given that India’s urban areas contribute to nearly two-thirds of its gross domestic product, even though they account for only 31% of the country’s population, they have been rightly called the engines of India’s growth. In this paper, I answer the following questions: What are the...