The National Health Insurance Scheme (Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana, RSBY) aims to improve poor people’s access to quality health care in India. This paper looks at the implementation of the scheme in Karnataka, drawing on a large survey of eligible households and interviews with empanelled...

This paper analyzes how preferences for a non-economic characteristic, such as caste, canaffect equilibrium patterns of matching in the marriage market, and empirically evaluates thisin the context of arranged marriages among middle-class Indians. We develop a model thatdemonstrates how the...

We study an economy where agents are heterogeneous in terms of observablewealth and unobservable talent. Adverse selection forces creditors to ask forcollateral. We study the two-way interaction between rationing in the creditmarket and the wages offered in the labor market. Both pooling and...

In this paper we review as well as contribute to the empirical literature on the impact of landreform on agricultural productivity in India. We find that, overall for all states, land-reform legislation had anegative and significant effect on agricultural productivity. However, this hides...

We analyze a simple and tractable model of occupational choice in the presence of credit marketimperfections. We examine the effect of parameters governing technology and transaction costs, andhistory, in terms of the initial wealth distribution, in determining the long-term wealth...

What accounts for the ubiquity of small vendors operating side-by-side in the urban centers of developing countries? Why don’t competitive forces drive some vendors out of the market? We ran an experiment in Kolkata vegetable markets in which we induced (via subsidizing) some vendors to sell...

What accounts for the ubiquity of small vendors operating side-by-side in the urban centers of developing countries? Why don’t competitive forces drive some vendors out of the market? We ran an experiment in Kolkata vegetable markets in which we induced (via subsidizing) some vendors to sell...