India's high growth over the last fifteen years has inspired several recent books and papers to examine the growth's source and sustainability--the two-volume study by Arvind Virmani being a case in point. This paper evaluates these recent works. It is argued that the cause of the take-off does...

The paper fully characterizes the Bertrand equilibria of oligopolistic markets where consumers may ignore the last (i. e. the right-most) digits of prices. Consumers, in this model, do not do this reflexively or out of irrationality, but only when they expect the time cost of acquiring full...

The evidence that the same total income can lead a household to choose different consumption vectors, depending on who brings in how much of the income, has led to an effort to replace the standard unitary model of the household with the ‘collective model’, which recognizes that the husband...

It has been known that, in aggregating infinite utility streams, there does not exist any social welfare function, which satisfies the axioms of Pareto, intergenerational equity, and continuity. We show that the impossibility result persists even without imposing the continuity axiom, and in...

This paper presents a new approach to evaluating the aggregate literacy level in a country or region. The resulting 'effective literacy' measure takes into account the intrahousehold externality arising from the presence of a literate member. A simple and natural axiomatic characterization is...

The authors analyze the example of a landlord, a moneylender, and a tenant (the landlord having access to finance on the same terms as the money lender). It is natural to assume that the landlord has first claim on the tenant's output (as a rule, if they live in the same village, he may have...

The problem of child labor has moved from a matter of regional and national concern to one of international debate and possible global persuasion and policy intervention. In crafting policy for mitigating this enormous problem of our times, it is important to start with a proper theoretical and...

The evidence that the same income can lead to different household decisions, depending on who the earner is, has led to an effort to replace the standard household model with the 'collective model', which recognises that a household's decisions depend on the power balance between the husband and...

This article addresses the interconnections between two seemingly disparate worlds—the world of abstract economic analysis and the world of policy and politics, drawing on the author’s personal experience in the two worlds. A fundamental premise underlying the analysis is that it...