The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the potential of social protection programs in mitigating labor market shocks. We examine the role of one of the world’s largest employment guarantee schemes, India’s MG-NREGA, in cushioning job losses in one of the worst affected economies due to the...

Using two novel administrative datasets containing monthly sales and input-sourcing information for plants and products with regional heterogeneity within India, we find that the inter- to intra-region trade ratio declines sharply after the COVID-19 induced lockdown in March 2020. The ratio...

We study the demand for skills by using text analysis methods on job descriptions in a large volume of ads posted on an online Indian job portal. We make use of domain-specific unlabeled data to obtain word vector representations (i.e., word embeddings) and discuss how these can be leveraged for...

The Covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the potential of social protection programs in mitigating labor market shocks. We examine the role of one of the world's largest employment guarantee schemes, India's MG-NREGA, in cushioning job losses in one of the worst affected economies due to the...

Climate change has increased rainfall uncertainty, leading to greater production risks in agriculture. We examine the gender-differentiated labor impacts of droughts resulting from lower precipitation using unique individual-level panel data for agricultural households in India over half a...

Unlike the global trend, India has witnessed a secular decline in women's employment rates over the past few decades. We use parametric and semi-parametric decomposition techniques to show that changes in individual and household attributes fully account for the fall in women's labor force...

We highlight the role of home productivity in explaining the gender gap in labor force participation (LFP), and the non-monotonic relationship of women's LFP with their education in developing countries (India) in contrast to the developed economies (United Kingdom, U.K.). We construct a model...

We examine employer preferences for hiring men vs women using 160,000 job ads posted on an online job portal in India, linked with more than 6 million applications. We apply machine learning algorithms on text contained in job ads to predict an employer's gender preference. We find that...