Abstract This paper analyzes the parking behavior of United Nations diplomats in New York City and highlights the key limitation of an earlier work which claims cultural norms to be the significant determinant of corruption. We show that after controlling for Government Effectiveness index,...

This paper tests the impact of National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) on rural-urban migration and urban unemployment in India. We use the Harris-Todaro framework to analyze labor market outcomes of this policy intervention. Using data from two rounds of National Sample Survey, we...

Questioning the government by the elected representatives on the floor of the house, irrespective of political ideology, is a fundamental feature of parliamentary democracy. In this paper, using data from the 15th and 16th Lok Sabha (LS), we study the performance of Member of Parliaments (MPs)...

This paper estimates the change in consumption caused by a higher real interest rate. We exploit the change in Indian banking legislation which encourages all banks to offer a higher interest rate on deposits to citizens above sixty years. We use detailed monthly consumption data from the Indian...

Free and fair elections are cornerstones of democracy. In India, electronic voting machines (EVMs) were introduced with the objective of reducing electoral fraud. We exploit the phased roll-out of the EVMs in state assembly elections to study its impact on electoral fraud, democracy, and...

In this paper we analyze women as political candidates in a representative democracy. Using 50 years of assembly elections data at the constituency level from the Indian states, we show that women are more likely to contest elections in those constituencies where gender ratio of the electors is...

We document the political participation of women in Indian democracy by comparing the turnout of women voters to men in the state elections from 1962 till 2012. Our analysis reveals striking findings: (1) There is a steady and a sharp decline in the gender bias in voting over time. In...