We measure multidimensional poverty in India using National Sample Survey Organization data from 2014-15 to 2017-18. We use income, health, education, and standard of living to measure the MPI. The MPI headcount declined from 26.9 to 13.75 per cent over the study period. The all-India estimates...

Background: Many adolescents grow-up with inadequate access to opportunities facing challenges and risks. This study focuses on recently migrant adolescent girls in India’s fast growing urban slum population for whom multiple vulnerabilities intersect, including gender, poverty and migrant...

This study examines the temporal pattern of healthcare infrastructure and manpower indicators across Indian states and regions between 2006-2020 using a composite index and data from various published sources. The study also investigates the monetary factors determining the quality and provision...

This paper revisits the relationship between agricultural productivity shocks and the infant sex ratio in India and investigates how this relationship changes when households have access to government-provided employment opportunities outside of agriculture. When a household's preference for...

Recent years have seen an increasing interest in using public-works programs as anti-poverty measures in developing countries. This paper analyzes the rural labor market impacts of the Indian National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, one of the most ambitious programs of its kind, by using a...

There is growing awareness that development-oriented government policies may be an important counterinsurgency strategy, but existing papers are usually unable to disentangle various mechanisms. Using a regression-discontinuity design, we analyze the impact of one of the world's largest...

Most countries around the world implement some form of a safety net program for poor households. A widespread concern is that such programs crowd out private-sector jobs. But they could also improve workers' welfare by allowing them to take on more risk, for example through self-employment. This...

In this paper we estimate production functions for cognition and health throughout four stages of childhood from 5-15 years of age using two cohorts of children drawn from the Young Lives Survey for India. The inputs into the production function include parental background, prior child cognition...

This paper uses willingness to pay (WTP) data from a field experiment in Hyderabad, India in 2013 to determine whether non-monetary prices better target health products to the poor than monetary prices. Monetary WTP is increasing in income and non-monetary WTP is weakly decreasing in income....

We examine the link between a mother's autonomy – the freedom and ability to think, express, act and make decisions independently – and the nutritional status of her children. We design a novel statistical framework that accounts for cultural and traditional environment, to create a measure...