In many developing and emerging economies, better employment opportunities in the non-farm sector have increased rural wages due to labour shortages during the peak agricultural season. Increasing wages often cause a substitution of labour for mechanical power, but extensive use of labour-saving...

Market completeness has important implications for household behavior. I firmly reject complete markets for smallholders but am unable to do so for non-smallholders. This leads to important differences in production behavior: smallholders reallocate labor across activities less in response to...

Market completeness has important implications for household behavior. I firmly reject complete markets for smallholders but am unable to do so for non-smallholders. This leads to important differences in production behavior: smallholders reallocate labor across activities less in response to...

Using detailed monthly panel data from rural India, this paper analyzes sectoral wage gaps for men and women. I document three important findings. First, there is clear evidence of sorting into sectors, with very large differences in worker human capital across the farm and non-farm sectors and...

Market completeness has important implications for household behavior. I firmly reject complete markets for smallholders but am unable to do so for non-smallholders. This leads to important differences in production behavior: smallholders reallocate labor across activities less in response to...

The basic objective of the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme (MGNREGP) is to provide safety net for the rural poor and to stabilize agricultural production through creating productive assets via employing labourers. Two important linked aspects are worth noting in...

India has a very diverse geography and many aspects of this geographical landscape are tied to its economy. Natural disasters are quite commonplace in some areas and thus the significance of disaster management policy becomes extremely crucial. This research study aimed to analyse policy...

We examine the efficacy of a popular anti-poverty programme, namely the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) of the Government of India. We argue that a chronic friction of wage payment delay in this flagship programme could adversely affect the welfare of the poor through two...

This note shows that in a developing economy, agriculture and Special Economic Zones (SEZ) can grow simultaneously without affecting one another if an appropriate subsidy policy is designed by the government. We consider increasing returns brought about by external economies of scale in the...

This paper studies the productivity impact of a contract change for tea pluckers in an Indian plantation. The contract, implemented at the end of a three-year cycle in which contracts are generally revised, was (a) the joint outcome of negotiations between twenty unions and plantations, (b)...