Using nationally representative data on employment and earnings, this paper documents a fall in wage inequality in India over the last two decades. It then examines the role played by increasing minimum wages for the lowest skilled workers in India in contributing to the observed decline....

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...

While it is well-acknowledged that the gendered division of labor within marriage adversely affects women's allocation of time to market work, there is less evidence on how extant social norms can influence women's work choices pre-marriage. We conduct an experiment on an online marriage market...

Firms are increasingly concerned about the resilience of their sales and sourcing decisions as conflicts, natural disasters, and labor disputes frequently disrupt trade. Using administrative tax data, we show that a temporary disruption in trade due to state border closures in India led to a...

Using nationally representative data on employment and earnings, this paper documents a fall in wage inequality in India over the last two decades. It then examines the role played by increasing minimum wages for the lowest skilled workers in India in contributing to the observed decline....

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) on farm sector wage rate. This identification strategy rests on the assumption that all districts across India would have had similar wage trends in the absence of the program....

Randomized control trials (RCTs) have become increasingly important as an evidence-based method to evaluate interventions such as government programs and policy initiatives. Frequently, however, RCTs are characterized by "imperfect compliance," in that not all the subjects who are randomly...

We examine the impact of the Americanization of names on the labor market outcomes of migrants. We construct a novel longitudinal data set of naturalization records in which we track a complete sample of migrants who naturalize by 1930. We find that migrants who Americanized their names...