This paper investigates the effect of a food subsidy programme in India on child malnutrition by addressing the following linked questions using household survey data that includes information on usage of the public distribution system. First, does the food subsidy induce higher expenditures on...

Financial inclusion plays an important role in giving households greater access to borrowing opportunities, which in turn can be used to improve human capital accumulation, socioeconomic status, and long-run economic development. One way to enhance households' access to and usage of the...

Using an audit experiment carried out on of India’s largest real estate websites, we document striking variations between landlords' treatment of upper-caste Hindus, Other Backward Castes, Scheduled Castes, and Muslims. We find strong evidence of discrimination against Muslim applicants, both...

In this paper we present a non-altruistic model of demand for children in the presence of uncertainty about children's survival. Children are seen as assets, as they provide help during old age. Theoretical predictions relating to the change in the mean and variance of the survival rate are...

Military spending has impact on social and economic conditions of any economy. Though, there has been mixed response found for the increasing military expenditure and economic growth in many countries. In this study attempt has been made to examine relationship between military expenditure and...

More than five decades after the Green Revolution transformed agriculture in the Indian state of Punjab, with positive spillovers to the rest of India, the state’s economy has been struggling. Punjab has fallen behind in rankings of per capita state output, and is experiencing environmental...

This paper empirically examines the relationship between economic growth and structural change in India over recent decades. It first estimates panel regressions with state-level data, to examine the impact of structural change on growth and vice versa. Bidirectional causality is found, which...

Income-based as well as most existing multidimensional poverty indices (MPI) assume equal distribution within the household and thus are likely to lead to yield a biased assessment of individual poverty, and poverty by age or gender. In this paper we first show that the direction of the bias...