This paper is an empirical analysis of the gains from contract farming in the case of poultry production in the state of Andhra Pradesh in India. The paper finds that contract production is more efficient than noncontract production. The efficiency surplus is largely appropriated by the...

The limited presence of futures exchanges in developing countries where commodity markets fall short of the ideal underscore the importance of understanding the relation between spot and futures markets. The paper examines the exceptional success of the soya oil contract at the National Board of...

Fuel taxes have returned to centre stage as a potential policy instrument for greenhouse gas abatement. However critics have complained that a fuel tax is regressive. Such claims are based on few studies conducted in developed countries. This paper tests the validity of this claim for India. It...

This paper studies the effect of decentralization of management and control on forest conservation in the central Himalayas. The density of forest cover (measured with satellite images and field surveys) in forests managed by village councils is compared with that in state-managed forests and in...

Using primary household data from India we estimate family utility function parameters that measure the relative importance of consumption, schooling of children and health (both physical and mental) and find that mental health is far more important than consumption or children's schooling in...

We examine the behaviour of pedestrians wishing to cross a stream of trasffic at signalized intersections. We model each padestrian as making a desccrete crossing choice by comparing the gaps between vehicles in traffic to an individual-specific "critical gap" that characterizes the individual's...

This paper examines the effect on relative wages when FDI occurs from the North to the South. The Northern firms undertake FDI to take advantage of the lower wage of unskilled labor in the South. The key assumption is that FDI from North to South occurs in an unskilled labor intensive production...

This paper models interaction between groups of agents by means of a graph where each node represents a group of agents and an arc represents bilateral interaction. It departs from the standard Katz-Shapiro framework by assuming that network benefits are restricted only amongst groups of linked...

Liberalization, stronger intellectual property rights laws and the commercialization of biotechnology have led the private sector to become an important supplier of varietal technology in agriculture in developed and developing countries. The departure from the public sector driven Green...

We examine group-lending under sequential financing. In a model with moral hazard, social capital and endogenous group formation, we identify conditions such that sequential financing with joint liability leads to positive assortative matching between borrowers with and without social capital...