Poverty and mortality are arguably the two major sources of loss of well-being. Most mainstream measures of human development capturing these two dimensions aggregate them in an ad-hoc and controversial way. This paper develops a new index aggregating the poverty and the mortality observed in a...

We build a model of child labor and study its implications for welfare. We assume that there is a trade-off between child labor and the accumulation of human capital. Even if parents are altruistic and child labor is socially inefficient, it may arise in equilibrium because parents fail to fully...

Though models of political economy suggest that changes in political institutions, such as democratization, should have large effects on policies and economic outcomes, the empirical literature finds ambiguous results. It is important, however, to ‘unbundle’ democratic reforms into more...

Summary This paper assesses degradation of forests managed by local communities (Van Panchayats (VPs)), relative to state protected and open access forests in the Indian state of Uttaranchal. It is based on ground-level ecological measures of forest quality (including canopy cover, biomass,...