This paper is the first attempt towards directly testing the existence of status seeking behavior of the poor for a developing economy, India, with the help of a large dataset. The paper empirically validates status consciousness among the relatively poor for both rural and urban areas across...

India embarked on a path of liberal economic reform in the 1990s after years of nurturing an intensively regulated and controlled economic environment that was loosened slightly in the mid-1980s. The most important and critical segments of this reform were trade and foreign investment. India has...

Abstract This paper attempts to provide an explanation to the debate whether infrastructure development is more effective than direct cash transfer to reduce wage disparity between skilled and unskilled workers. We use a simple general equilibrium structure to argue that in presence of symmetric...

Barriers to outsourcing that are being currently implemented in the US effectively tax its companies who export jobs through outsourcing. The objective is to raise domestic employment. Given that many of the important international markets where the US has a comparative advantage feature...

We provide an analysis of enforcement policies applicable to informal labor market in a framework with heterogeneous firms, endogenous determination of informal wage and politically dictated strategies. We argue that firms which operate both in the formal and informal sectors do very little to...

The recent growth experience in India highlights the role of skill-based service sector and productivity improvement rather than a significant rise in physical capital accumulation. In this context we study the possible impact of higher productivity of labor in the formal sector on the informal...