Despite efforts to mandate and finance local governments' provision of environmental sanitation services, outcomes remain poor in the villages surveyed in the four South Indian states. The analysis indicates some key issues that appear to hinder improvements in sanitation. Local politicians tend...

Participation of beneficiaries in the monitoring of public services is increasingly seen as a key to improving their quality. We conducted a randomized evaluation of three interventions to encourage beneficiaries' participation to India: providing information on existing institutions, training...

This paper focuses on infant and child mortality in rural areas of India. We construct a flexible duration model, which allows for frailty at multiple levels and interactions between the child's age and individual, socioeconomic, and environmental characteristics. The model is estimated using...

Taking advantage of variation across Indian states in labor reforms, this paper studies the economic effects of labor dispute resolution legislation (DL) and employment protection legislation (EPL) in the manufacturing sector. We find that laws that increase the cost of dispute resolution or...

We utilize household-level consumption expenditure data from India to examine the evolution of inequality during 1983-2004. Various measures of inequality show that inequality levels were relatively stable during 1983-93, but increased during 1993-2004. The increases in inequality have not...

This paper explores the impact of the emergence of China and India on Foreign Capital Stocks (FCS) in other economies. Using bilateral FCS data from 1990-2003 and drawing from the Knowledge-Capital Model of multinational enterprises to control for fundamental determinants of FCS across...

This paper documents the quality of medical advice in low-income countries. Our evidence on health care quality in low-income countries is drawn primarily from studies in four countries: Tanzania, India, Indonesia, and Paraguay. We provide an overview of recent work that uses two broad...

Increasing evidence suggests that the level and distribution of cognitive skills is more important to economic development than absolute measures of schooling attainment, and that income and skill inequality are inextricably linked. Yet for most of the developing world no internationally...

Recognition of the potentially deleterious implications of inequality in opportunity originating in a skewed asset distribution has spawned considerable interest in land reforms. However, little attention has been devoted to the fact that, in the longer-term, the measures used to implement land...

Although opinions on impacts of land market transfers are sharply divided, few studies explore welfare- and productivity-impact of land sales markets over a long time horizon and national scale. A panel spanning almost 20 years, together with an indicator of climatic (rainfall) shocks, allows us...