My dissertation builds and estimates models of competition for the U.S. motion picture industry. The motion picture industry provides a rich setting for exploring the effect of competition. First, there is a rapid refresh cycle with new titles being the mainstay of industry activity. Modeling...

Labor market penalty associated with motherhood (in short, motherhood penalty) is an important issue related to gender equality in the society. Our paper is an attempt to empirically examine the extent of motherhood penalty in the context of Indian labor market. We use a nationally...

In this paper we examine whether students' and teachers' identity play any role in the learning outcome of students. Specifically, we ask if a student benefits by learning from a teacher of her same gender. Unlike the existing literature which explains such interaction through role model effect...

Although most countries in the world are rapidly urbanizing, the majority of the global population – particularly the poor – continue to live in rural areas. This Handbook rejects the popular notion that urbanization should be universally encouraged and presents clear evidence of...

Sugata Marjit and Saibal Kar, The Outsiders: Economic Reform and Informal Labour in a Developing Economy, (Hardcover) ₹ 695, Oxford University Press.

We identify a new phenomenon – “Plebeian bias” – in the crowdsourcing of creative designs. Stardom, an emphasis on established individuals, has long been observed in many offline contexts. Does this phenomenon carry over to online communities? We investigate a large-scale dataset...

Many products and services are best (and typically) described in prose. In extant preference-measurement methods, however, due to the challenge of numerically representing prose in econometric models, products can only be described to participants and portrayed in the utility model as a list of...

An individual is characterized by several ascriptive markers like race, religion, language and so on. In this paper, we provide a general theory of how one dimension of identity, or a composite of several dimensions becomes politically salient. In our model, exogenous institutional or...