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The present study is an attempt to identify the main sources of growth of five selected Indian industries, viz. Cotton Textile, Jute Textile, Sugar, Paper (including paper board) and Bicycle. The investigation is carried out by estimating production functions of the Cobb-Douglas form by utilizing time series of cross-section data for the industries under study. The estimates of the elasticities of output with respect to various inputs, returns to scale and 'technical progress' provide the basis for drawing inferences regarding the nature of the growth of the industries. The data and the variables used in the study are discussed in Section 1. Section 2 provides a brief discussion of the methodology. The results of the investigation are presented in Section 3. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Private tutoring participation is increasing in several developing countries, and this expansion has attracted the interest of scholars spanning disciplines of economics, sociology and history. This paper presents a theoretical model of private tutoring demand. The model incorporates the household and school characteristics in a developing country context and demonstrates the source of gender gaps in access to private tutoring. Using a recent database from India and employing a hurdle model approach, the paper also provides estimates of the drivers of private tutoring participation and spending for pre-secondary students. Our results indicate evidence of gender gaps in private tutoring access, and that the socio-economic profile of a student is positively correlated with tutoring demand. Further, school quality indicators are negatively correlated with tutoring participation, suggesting that students at 'better' schools rely less on tutoring. Overall, the findings suggest that tutoring demand is influenced by a mix of demand-side (household, community drivers) and supply-side (school quality and learning environment) factors. The results bring into focus the equity implications of tutoring growth and the need to improve school quality in order to reduce the dependence on private tutoring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scheduled Caste (SC) and Scheduled Tribe (ST) women in India have relatively lower usage of period products than women of the General category. This paper attempts to understand and uncover the social factors explaining inequalities in the period product usage among these groups. This paper uses data from the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5), conducted in 2019–21, for this study, with a sample of 49,136 SC, 44,392 ST, and 41,045 General caste women in the age group of 15 to 24 years. Using the Fairlie decomposition method, we explain the inequalities in the period product usage between SC, ST, and general categories. Differences in wealth index (SC-Gen: 49.54%; ST-Gen: 46.6%), respondent's education level (SC-Gen: 22.85%; ST-Gen: 17.3%), watching television (SC-Gen: 09.44%; ST-Gen: 10.1%), reading newspaper (SC-Gen: 08.71%; ST-Gen: 05.09%), and toilet facility (SC-Gen: 06.36%; ST-Gen: 03.05%) account for a large portion of the gap in the period product usage among these groups. Government, policymakers, and NGOs should focus on creating comprehensive menstrual health and hygiene (MHH) programmes, including educational programmes and mass media campaigns, while increasing focus on disadvantaged communities, viz. SCs and STs to make the necessary nudge for girls and women to adopt hygienic menstrual practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Does a legal change in women's inheritance rights have long-term effects on child health outcomes? This paper examines the effect of an improvement in women's inheritance rights on child nutritional health outcomes in India using a difference-in-differences estimation approach. We use the staggered implementation of the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005 to investigate the impact of the reform on anthropometric indictors of child health: being underweight, stunted, and wasted. The findings of this study reveal that an improvement in women's inheritance rights has a positive impact on children's health and reduces the probability of nutritional deficiency in the child. We identify mechanisms such as increased educational levels, better marital outcomes, and improved intrahousehold bargaining power of women as potential pathways through which inheritance rights affect child nutritional health outcomes. The results of the paper lend credence to growing evidence that legal recognition of women's inheritance rights can have sustained and second-generation effects, in spite of poor enforcement mechanisms and persistence of deep-rooted societal bias against women holding property. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we study the effect on intimate partner violence of a large public work programme in India that explicitly encourages female participation (MGNREGA). Based on detailed administrative data, we show that the work programme leads to more violence against women. We show that the effect is caused by female employment, and argue that it can be explained by a 'male backlash' mechanism, where husbands exercise violence to regain power within marriage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dramatic differences in the quality of human life are a prominent feature of today's world. Poverty and inequality mutilate the life chances of millions around the globe, notwithstanding otherwise impressive economic achievements. To offset the challenges posed by the persistence and production of poverty and inequality, many governments and international development agencies have begun to formulate and implement agendas for social protection. Nevertheless, even as governments institute social protection programmes to ameliorate human misery, the outcomes of such initiatives remain vastly varied. Understanding the factors for such variations assumes urgent relevance. What explains such variations? In this paper, I contribute to the growing body of scholarship that seeks to reignite interest in class politics as shaping the implementation of social protections. I build on and develop a discussion of politics that takes seriously class politics, especially the ensemble of collaborations and competitions between classes. I nuance existing perspectives on class politics by emphasising the importance of both collaboration as well as conflict between social classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses whether living in a locality with high crime against women affects the probability of early marriage—that is, marriage before the legal age of marriage of girls. Using a nationally representative longitudinal data set and tackling the potential endogeneity of local crime rates, we find that perceived crime against women in the locality significantly increases the likelihood of early marriage of girls, while there is no such effect on boys of comparable age group. We also find no such effect of gender-neutral crimes (such as theft and robbery) on the likelihood of early marriage of girls. Moreover, we find that the relationship holds only in conservative households where the purdah system is practised, and also in the northern region of India, where patriarchal culture and gender norms are stronger than in the southern region. A sensitivity analysis assessing the potential impact of unobservable confounders suggests that our estimates are unlikely to be affected by omitted variable bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Entertainment-education has been touted as a potent delivery channel for health education campaigns. Yet, there is little evidence of its causal effects. This paper aims to fill the gap in the literature by using a field experiment in India to study two questions on the efficacy of health entertainment-education. First, can health entertainment-education, particularly through films that show role models and draw on emotions, lead to lasting, positive change in health knowledge and behavior? Second, can financial incentives for ex-post health literacy boost the effectiveness of health entertainment-education? The results show that health entertainment-education successfully increased health knowledge (e.g. knowledge about cleanliness and hygiene) by 16 percent. These gains persist almost one year later, although there were no observed impacts on health behaviors. Further, financial incentives do not appear to have any effects. These insights contribute to our knowledge of what works for health education in low-income settings, so that future education campaigns can be crafted with more meaningful impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been considerable interest in studying the effect of female labor market outcomes on intrahousehold bargaining. This paper examines the effects of local labor market opportunities in India on a variety of female bargaining characteristics, including domestic violence and intrahousehold discussion of important issues. Specifically, I utilize district-level data on employment in various occupations to calculate an employment shift-share index that proxies gender-specific labor demand. I find that improvements in labor market conditions for women lead to a decrease in perceptions of domestic violence, whereas improvements in predicted demand for male employment have little or negative effects on women's household bargaining power. When disaggregated by indicators of initial bargaining power, women that have lower levels of initial bargaining power either see no effect on bargaining or experience a backlash effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using detailed individual and household-level data from the first two rounds of the India Human Development Survey (IHDS) conducted in 2004–05 and 2011–12, this paper estimates the health gap that exists between married and widowed women from Hindu households. We use the most commonly used anthropometric indicators of nutritional status in adults – body mass index and incidence of underweight – to estimate and decompose the gap in health outcomes that exists between these two groups of women. The overall results presented in this paper suggest that widows from Hindu households have significantly lower body mass index and higher incidence of underweight compared to their married counterparts and also experience high levels of discrimination. Access to various government welfare schemes and increased autonomy, however, is found to offset the detrimental health effects of widowhood to a large extent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literature has established that the alarming female poverty rate is a crucial factor contributing to missing older women in India. Given this, the following research examines the role of an unconditional cash transfer programme (Indira Gandhi National Old Age Pension Scheme) implemented in India on the household budget share incurred on cereals, pulses, vegetables; fruits and nuts, meat; eggs and fish, milk and milk products when the program recipient is an elderly woman. The paper uses the longitudinal household-level data (2004–05 and 2011–12) released by the India Human Development Survey and utilises a quasi-experimental framework of propensity score matching combined with fixed effects to estimate the effects of the pension on the disaggregated food budget share incurred by the pension recipient households. The findings in this paper suggest that women's access to pension has a positive effect on budget share allocated on vegetables, fruits and nuts and meat, fish and eggs. The positive effects persist for continuous program recipients. Further, to address any concerns on endogeneity, an instrumental variable strategy has been used. This paper provides evidence that female pension recipient households in India do move towards nutrient-rich food items. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the size, growth, salaries, fee levels and per-pupil-costs of private schools, and compares these with the government school sector. Official data show a steep growth of private schooling and a corresponding rapid shrinkage in the size of the government school sector in India, suggesting parental abandonment of government schools. Data show that a very large majority of private schools in most states are 'low-fee' when judged in relation to state per capita income, per-pupil expenditure in the government schools, and the officially stipulated rural minimum wage rate for daily-wage-labour. This suggests that affordability is an important factor behind the migration towards and growth of private schools. The main reason for the very low fee levels in private schools is their lower teacher salaries, which the data show to be a small fraction of the salaries paid in government schools; this is possible because private schools pay the market-clearing wage, which is depressed by a large supply of unemployed graduates in the country, whereas government schools pay bureaucratically determined minimum-wages. The paper shows how education policies can be harmful when formulated without seeking the evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exposure to media has been successful in shifting gender norms in many developing countries. In this paper, we study the impact of a government-led media intervention on the probability of the birth of a daughter and the gender gap in early life health outcomes. The intervention, implemented in India between 2015 and 2018, included a mass media campaign designed to increase the perception of the value of a female child, while also tightening the policing of illegal sex-selective abortions. We exploit variation in the timing of exposure to the programme across Indian districts as well as quasi-exogenous variation in the sex of the firstborn child to identify the impact of the programme and find that it led to an increased proportion of female births as well as a reduction in the gender gap in mortality in intensively treated families. The mechanism that explains our results is a relative increase in health investments in daughters, such as breastfeeding and vaccinations. Our results have important policy implications: they emphasise the importance of demand-side measures to change people's preferences for daughters rather than just imposing top-down, supply-side bans on discriminatory behaviour, which can lead to increased gender discrimination on alternative margins. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the link between decentralisation in school management and student achievement levels in secondary schools in India. It employs observational data from two school surveys conducted as part of the Young Lives project in the southern Indian states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh to create a measure of decentralisation as a latent construct. The relationship between decentralisation and students' abilities in mathematics and English is measured using linear mixed effects models. Contrary to the expectations in much literature, we find a negative association between decentralisation and students' scores on Maths and English assessments, even when controlling for a variety of individual and school characteristics. The results from the analysis therefore problematises decentralisation initiatives such as school-based management to improve student achievement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies educational aspirations and grade achievements of teenagers in India, using Structural Equation Modelling with data from the Young Lives Study. The analysis differentiates direct effects of relevant socio-economic and individual characteristics on educational output from indirect effects through aspirations. In this sample, some student characteristics – parents' education, mothers' caste and the student's gender – have no direct effect on educational output, but an indirect effect on educational aspirations going through abilities. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds, and in particular girls, are at a disadvantage at age 12 because they have accumulated lower cognitive abilities. Abilities shape aspirations, which then impact educational output beyond the mere effect of abilities. Girls are at a double disadvantage: besides lower average skills at age 12, they developed lower aspirations than boys of the same characteristics. The economic situation of the household was neither directly nor indirectly related with students' achievements in school. These results help distinguish aspirations as drivers of behaviour from aspirations as correlates of other characteristics, and they have relevant policy implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies productivity convergence to the regional and national frontiers among manufacturing firms in India, using panel data over the period 1999 to 2010. We find evidence that lagging firms converge to their national and regional frontiers, with faster speed of convergence to the national frontier than to their regional frontier. We extend our analysis to explore how firms' participation in foreign markets (through exporting and investing abroad) affects the process of convergence. Our results suggest a ranking of firms' speed of convergence based on their level of international engagement through exports, with non-exporters converging faster to their technological frontiers, followed by non-continuous exporters, and finally by continuous exporters. These results suggest that more established exporters are closer to the technological frontier and therefore have less scope to catch up than their less persistent counterparts and non-exporting firms. However, we did not find significant differences in the speed of convergence amongst exporting firms that have moved to the next stage of globalisation by investing abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper constructs long-run estimates of total missing women (including missing girls at birth and excess female deaths) in China and India over seven decades from 1950 to 2020. We find that the number of missing women in India has been higher than in China throughout the seven decades. Over time, missing girls at birth grew faster in China than in India, but China has made more rapid progress in reducing excess female deaths after birth. While the share of missing girls at birth in total missing women has risen since the 1980s, there has also been a shift in excess female mortality from younger to older age groups. Our estimated trends are consistent with key economic, social, demographic and technological events and developments in the two countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors respond to a commentary on their paper "History, Institutions and Economic Performance: The Legacy of Colonial Land Tenure Systems in India." They describe the major difference between the paper and other articles on the coding of land tenure systems for the Central Provinces. They note the proprietary right between the landlord-based system and the actual owner of the land.

This paper studies the impact of property rights legislation on the political participation of Scheduled Tribes (STs) - an indigenous community of India. The legislation recognised forest land rights of STs who had been historically residing over forests without formal land titles. Utilising administrative data on land titles, we show that increased demand for land titles increases the political participation of STs as election candidates. This increase is on account of new political candidates that are contested by non-mainstream political parties. We provide evidence that incomplete implementation, that raises but does not meet expectations, is the mechanism. In particular, land title applications that are rejected by sub-district/district-level authorities are driving this increase. Our results suggest that land titling legislations can encourage marginalised beneficiary groups to use political participation as a means to establish their land rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates whether aspirations matter for education, which offers a common route out of poverty. We find that mother aspirations are strongly related to the child's grade achieved at age 18. The relation is nonlinear, suggesting there is a threshold, and depends on caste, household income and the village setting. The coefficients remain large and significant when applying control function estimation, using first born son as instrument. A similar strong relation is observed with learning outcomes, including local language, English and maths test results, and with attending school, but not with attending private education. These results are confirmed for outcomes at age 15. The findings provide direct evidence on the contribution of mother aspirations to children's education outcomes and point to aspirations as a channel of intergenerational mobility. They suggest that education outcomes can be improved more rapidly by taking aspirations into account when targeting education programmes, and through interventions that shape aspirations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the political economy of three significant policy decisions of the Congress-United Progressive Alliance government between November 2005 and February 2006. These decisions improved the regulatory incentives for the smaller and efficient firms in the Indian GSM industry, which were heavily dependent on foreign investment for their expansion. India's telecommunications sector became more attractive to foreign investors as a result of these regulatory changes. This was a notable departure from the past when government policy had favoured large domestic investors using CDMA technology who were not dependent on foreign capital. A globalisation friendly policy change occurred after a Centre-Left United Progressive Alliance coalition came to power. The paper argues that these decisions, which promoted both competition and foreign investment, occurred due to the increased sensitivity of the Department of Telecommunications towards the needs of the relatively smaller GSM service providers, driven by considerations of efficiency. They were not driven by a crisis of private investment, foreign pressure, or stealth. The shift occurred in normal times when the Department of Telecommunications under a persistent ministerial stewardship took on a regulator, which was less interested in engineering this shift. This globalisation-friendly strategy depended to a large extent on the particular industrial sub-sector that the ruling party or coalition supported for spreading telecommunications in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores gender inequality within households in the decision of private versus government school choice in India. Using a three-period longitudinal dataset on rural households from Uttar Pradesh, a northern state of India, this paper estimates a household fixed effects model and finds that there is an intra-household gender bias of 6 percentage points in private school enrolment among children aged 6–16 years. Contrary to the trend in overall enrolment, the gender gap in private school choice is rising over time, and is more pronounced in villages with a larger cost difference between private and government schooling. This finding remains robust even after controlling for average school quality and considering potential endogeneity of the cost variables. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although there are several studies documenting the impact of the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) – the largest preschool intervention – in India, few have documented to what extent it improves the quantity and quality of food consumed by young children. This paper attempts to provide causal estimates of the impact of the ICDS on calories, protein, iron, and Vitamin A intakes of children. Using matching techniques to define an appropriate counterfactual, and a primary survey in four villages in rural Bihar, our results suggest that: (a) for older children three to six years who benefit from cooked meals, the ICDS did result in higher intakes of calories, protein, and iron, and no substantive evidence that as a consequence there was substitution away from food at home. However, there was no impact on vitamin A intake; (b) for younger children whose mothers are given take-home rations, there is no evidence the ICDS improved intakes of calories or any other nutrients. Thus, even though the monetary value of the transfer was the same across both age groups, there is evidence to suggest the mode of transfer does seem to matter to ICDS effectiveness, consistent with other literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The effectiveness of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) on rural labour market dynamics in India has been widely debated in the literature. However, the impact of the NREGS on non-agricultural labour market and children schooling outcomes in reference to exogenous rainfall shock is unclear from the existing literature. This paper exploits the Indian National Sample Survey and rainfall measures from the precipitation archive of the University of Delaware to investigate the role of the NREGS in the labour market and schooling outcomes of children during shocks. Using a difference-in-differences methodology, we focus on disaggregated shock specification and find a shock-cushioning pattern for the NREGS during negative shocks. However, there is an excess demand for labour during positive shock periods resulting from exposure to the NREGS. The implication is that the excess informal labour market opportunity translates to a reduction in school engagement for children. These findings summarily distinguish the role of the NREGS during positive and negative shocks respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The economics literature on returns to education has focused largely on wage workers, thereby ignoring a sizable section of the workforce which is self-employed. This paper presents the estimates of private returns to education for business, farm and wage workers in India using a nationally representative household survey. The paper addresses the sample-selectivity issue arising due to endogenous sector allocation in the earnings equation using the multinomial-selection approach. Our results show that the average rate of return to education is higher for wage workers followed by business and farm workers. Focusing only on wage workers would provide an overestimate of returns by 30 per cent for business workers and by 40-50 per cent for farm workers. Further, the profile of returns across the education ladder varies perceptibly for the three type of workers with higher education being more rewarding for wage workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of reduced availability of hard liquor in bars on sexual crimes against women outside their homes. We construct a district level panel dataset on reported crimes and use an identification strategy that exploits a natural experiment that led to a complete crackdown on bars selling hard liquor in a state of India. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we show that placing restrictions on alcohol sale through closure of on-premise drinking outlets that serve hard liquor reduces reported incidence of sexual assault and harassment against women but has no effect on reported rapes. We conduct placebo tests and show that the result is not driven by existing pre-trends. The result is also robust to an alternative estimation strategy using a synthetic control construction and the most conservative estimate shows a reduction in sexual assaults by 10%. These results have policy implications for regulating social drinking spaces due to their impact on women's public safety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The patriarchal kinship system in India considers sons as harbingers of prosperity and daughters as liabilities who require significant outlay of resources through their lifetimes. This social system assigns a higher value to sons and perpetuates discrimination in various forms. In this paper, instead of focusing on inferior outcomes for daughters, we provide empirical evidence of disproportionate penalties placed on long-term health outcomes of their parents. Using nationally representative data on health expenditure and outcomes for 2014, we find that a higher number of daughters are associated with increased probabilities of chronic ailment and self-reported poor health among the elderly. The effects are significantly weaker for scheduled tribes, a social group with relatively egalitarian gender norms. Also, these effects are stronger for higher quintiles of standardised number of daughters. Our findings remain robust to a variety of internal validity tests. In particular, we use a recent method that accounts for omitted variable bias to arrive at consistent estimates of bias adjusted treatment effects. Improved access to education and employment for daughters, adequate social protection and milestone-based conditional cash transfers are some ways to ameliorate this bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Measuring gender inequality in land ownership is essential for assessing progress in women's economic empowerment, tracing the impact of progressive laws on actual practice, and monitoring SDG 5 on gender equality. To effectively assess inter-gender (male-female) gaps in land ownership, however, requires multiple measures. We also need to know which women are more likely to own land by tracing intra-gender differences. To date, no study on India has provided a full range of measures on inter-gender inequality in land ownership or focused on intra-gender variations. This paper uses unique longitudinal data to measure inter-gender gaps in agricultural land ownership through multiple indicators, and changes over 2009–2014 across nine states. It also analyses intra-gender gaps, and identifies the factors–individual, household and regional–affecting a woman's likelihood of owning land. Despite significant advancement towards equality in inheritance laws, women are found to constitute barely 14% of landowners owning 11% of agricultural land in rural landowning households, averaged across states. Moreover, women are significantly more likely to inherit land as widows than as daughters, highlighting the divergence between the legal strengthening of daughters' rights and the social legitimacy that widows' claims continue to enjoy over daughters' claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Food insecurity and hunger are significant components of standard poverty measures and continue to be pressing issues in emerging market economies. However, these issues have received less attention in examining the indirect effects of monetary policy. In this paper, we study the impact of monetary policy on food inequality in India. Specifically, we examine the impact of monetary policy shocks on relative food prices and the distribution of food consumption, focusing on subsistence food consumption of poor households. Using the most recent household survey data, we estimate the dynamic effects of monetary policy shocks on relative food prices and the distribution of food consumption in rural and urban India using a dynamic common factor model. Our results show that expansionary monetary policy shocks increase the relative price of food, reduce the food consumption of poor households, and raise food consumption inequality across households. Increase in the relative price of food following a monetary expansion disproportionately hurts the poor relative to the non-poor. This is the first study to provide evidence of a 'food price channel' in monetary policy transmission to understand food inequality. This study holds important policy implications for Indian central bankers and policymakers as well as for those in similar emerging market economies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to understand discrimination in the provision of public schools in rural India and how it affects the educational outcome of social groups. Using census data, we find that villages with a higher share of marginalised castes viz. Scheduled Castes (SC) and Scheduled Tribes (ST) have a lower probability of having public schools. The negative relationship is non-monotonic as the marginal probabilities get weaker beyond a threshold level of SC/ST share. Though the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (Education for All) programme, mainly intended to expand elementary education, has reduced the gaps in the provision of primary schools, the extent of discrimination has increased at the secondary level. A strong association between public schools and educational outcomes highlights the importance of public schools. Finally, we show that the caste-based provisioning of public schools partially explains the disparity in the educational outcomes across social groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the informal channels of the job search process through migrant networks in the urban labour markets in developing countries. Using a novel approach and nationwide sample survey, we measure various aspects of migrant networks such as size, diversity, efficiency and experience content and estimate their effect on probability of employment. Our findings suggest that migrant stock (having experience content) has an inverted-U relationship with the probability of finding a job for a migrant. The share of employed workers in a migrant network (efficiency) and different origin identity (diversity) positively affect the employment outcome through weak ties. Further, the migrant network effect is more active in larger cities as compared to smaller urban areas. The implications of this study indicate towards the importance of non-market informal channels in job searches and the need for integrating labour markets to harness the benefits of larger positive network externalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Land ownership has long been argued to enhance farm productivity by improving tenure security. But would this hold for female and male owners alike? The relationship between land ownership and productivity has been investigated relatively little from a gender perspective in most regions, with work on Asia being especially sparse. Even less explored are gender differences in the likelihood of landowners self-cultivating as vs. leasing out their land. This paper uses a unique household-level dataset for nine states of India to first assess gender differences in the likelihood of landowners self-cultivating or renting out their land. It then analyses differences in farm productivity between female and male owners who self-cultivate. The effect of caste disadvantage is also explored. We find that women owners are significantly less likely than male owners to self-cultivate their land. This is linked especially to family labour constraints and regional opportunities. However, among those who do self-cultivate, the annual farm productivity per hectare does not differ significantly by the gender of the owner-cultivator. This holds true with or without controlling for other factors. Caste matters, however: Scheduled Caste owner-cultivators of both genders have significantly lower productivity than upper-caste ones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The liberalization of the Indian economy in the 1990s led to an unprecedented increase in the availability of prenatal ultrasound technology. In this paper, we analyze the differential spread of ultrasound in India at the state level over a ten-year period (1999 to 2008) and the consequences for the prevalence of sex-selective abortion. Omitting the Southern Indian states, which had the fastest increase in ultrasound use and little sex selection, we find that higher levels of ultrasound use within a state are positively associated with the probability that a child is born male. This increased likelihood of having a male child is only found for children with no older brothers, i.e. births most likely to be affected by sex selection. The positive relationship between state-level ultrasound use and having a male child can be found across various subsamples: urban and rural, older and younger mothers, mothers with high and low education. The estimates are robust to including linear cohort-year time trends and prenatal health care controls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the causal relationship between climate shocks and collective violence in India using annual data over the period 1954-2006. We use the ARDL bounds testing approach to deal with problems of autocorrelation and non-stationarity of key variables. Rather than rainfall, we find that it is maximum temperature that has long and short run effects on collective violence, with unidirectional causality from temperature shocks to riots. A one standard deviation increase in maximum temperature over the long run average increases the number of riots by 55 per cent. Return to long run equilibrium after a temperature shock takes approximately 15 years. The insignificance of rainfall holds whether we consider rainfall levels or rainfall growth. Given the absence of long run relationships between income levels /growth and riots, it is unlikely that the income channel is the one through which climate affects riots in India. Instead, the evidence suggests a psychological channel through which temperature affects riots in India, with hotter temperatures being associated with increased levels of aggression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis of household wealth dynamic remains an important methodology in the identification of poverty traps. To overcome measurement issues in survey data, livelihoods-based approaches of the dynamics of poverty are typically examined using panel regressions of a livelihoods regression on household assets and other socio-economic factors over time. In this paper, we characterise the livelihoods regression as a 'livelihoods technology', and use a latent class-technology approach to account for heterogeneity in how households generate a livelihood. We use a detailed dataset from rural India covering 213 households across 2001–2014, and control for selection issues through a Heckman Selection model. Our results are the first in the wealth dynamics literature to show that substantial heterogeneity exists in the technologies with which households generate their livelihoods. Importantly, we show that accounting for heterogeneity in household livelihoods 'technologies' more readily identifies different equilibria in wealth levels and provides previously foregone information on who is poor and why they remain poor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effect of trade facilitated R&D spillovers on the productivity of manufacturing firms in India, inter-sectoral variation in the effect on productivity and the importance of firms' investment in R&D, technology imports and plant and machinery in enhancing the productivity effect. Using firm level panel data, the study shows that R&D spillovers have a significant effect on productivity and that this effect is greater in technology-intensive industries. The paper also shows that firms' investment in plant and machinery enhances the productivity effect of R&D spillovers. The paper provides detailed micro-level evidence on the argument that trade openness promotes technological progress in developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on son preference postulates a strong link between marriage expenditures, dowry practices, and son preference, leading to the elimination of female foetuses and important discriminatory practices against girls. This statement, however, has not, as far as I know, been tested empirically using a representative sample of the Indian population. Using data from the India Human Development Survey (IHDS) conducted in 2005, this paper shows that marriage expenditures by the bride's family and dowry payments reduce stated son preference, ceteris paribus, supporting the idea that the bride's family's marriage expenditures and dowries are Veblen goods. The results, therefore, support the sankritisation theory, as expensive marriage practices are used to enhance social status. This result is robust to a series of robustness check, including the use of revealed son preference. The main drivers behind son preference appear to be exogamy and the need for old age support. Other important factors are religious beliefs and access to modern information (education and media). Finally, this article also shows that lavish marriage expenditures, for both groom's and bride's family, reduce fertility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While quota-based and other affirmative actions remain on the policy radar of nations faced with social inequalities, there is limited evidence informing policy choices at the national level. This paper estimates the mid-term impact of quota-based affirmative action in higher education (HE) in India implemented from 2008, which mandates that 27 per cent of seats are to be reserved for the Other Backward Classes (OBC) in public funded institutions of HE. Exploiting the differences in participation across social groups, age cohort,s and geographies with varied histories of affirmative action, our triple difference method estimates the impact of the Act by the year 2011–2012. Our results indicate that southern and northcentral states that already had quotas in place for a fairly long period of time, do not contribute much in further expansion of enrolment of OBCs; instead, the eastern region, where such a policy did not exist for long has about 0.12 points improvement in enrolment. Our estimates are robust to different specifications and the impact seems to be non-existent amongst the richest. It suggests that future policy initiatives need to be more nuanced considering regional differences in policy histories, supply of institutions, and extant rates of HE participation of the disadvantaged sections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we examine whether the earnings of sex workers in India are significantly different from those in domestic work, a trade that is also gendered in nature and can be done with similarly low levels of training and education. We analyse this using data collected during fieldwork in the cities of Kolkata and Delhi in India. Our results confirm that there is a significant difference in wages between the two groups of workers. We consider the extent to which the stigma attached to sex work contributes to the higher wages in this occupation relative to domestic work. To do this, we control for endogeneity caused by selection on unobservables. We find that stigma is a significant contributory factor to the wage differential. We also preliminarily consider an alternate explanation – that of violence in the trade. We find that the experience of violence in the trade does not affect the take home earnings of the individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically evaluates the design of India's Anti-poverty programmes. In recent years, successive Indian Governments have sought to improve the performance of these programmes by decentralising their administration, vesting village governments with greater responsibility for their monitoring and oversight. An academic literature hypothesises that socioeconomic divisions within villages and the weak political strength of the poor reduces the effectiveness of decentralised programmes since, under these conditions, elites are able to 'capture' funds intended for the poor. This paper argues that the effect of administrative decentralisation of poverty programmes and local public goods on the magnitude of benefits to the poor depends not just on their political strength but also on the incentives the non-poor have to improve the welfare of the poor. The design of policy pays insufficient attention to such incentive issues. Empirical analysis provides support for this belief. The regression analysis of the paper reveals that welfare receipts affect the labour supply decisions of the poor and that the implementation of welfare programmes under control of village governments takes these effects into account. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the intergenerational transmission of gender attitudes in India, a setting with severe discrimination against women and girls. We use survey data on gender attitudes (specifically, about the appropriate roles and rights of women and girls) collected from nearly 5500 adolescents attending 314 schools in the state of Haryana, and their parents. We find that when a parent holds a more discriminatory attitude, his or her child is about 11 percentage points more likely to hold the view. We find that parents hold greater sway over students' gender attitudes than their peers do, and that mothers influence children's gender attitudes more than fathers. Parental attitudes influence child attitudes more in Scheduled Caste communities and student gender attitudes are positively correlated with behaviours such as interacting with children of the opposite gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Little is known about the effect of poverty alleviation programmes on mental health. In this paper we use variation in district implementation dates and location of residence to examine the short-run effect of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme in India on psychological wellbeing. We find that in the first year of the programme, women in recipient districts were less likely to experience depression symptoms. The effects of the programme on men's mental health, on the other hand, are generally not statistically significant and are not robust to different specifications. We provide suggestive evidence that one mechanism through which the programme could have affected women, at least in the short-run, was providing them with greater economic security and independence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides evidence for a non-linear relationship between local language and English reading scores in multilingual South India. The mechanism suggests that being taught English prematurely may lead to struggles in English literacy acquisition; whereas being taught English after achieving a threshold reading level in the local language may lead to success in transitioning to English literacy acquisition. We base our findings on non-parametric and parametric regression analysis of data from assessments that were uniquely designed for South and Southeast Asian languages, and for multilingual children. Our findings help explain the global trend of increased school enrolment, with learning achievements lagging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the long-run (steady-state) relationship between levels of educational human capital and levels of income for the 15 major states of India between 1965 and 1992. The relationship is estimated using the Pooled Mean Groups (PMG) technique; which produces common long-run coefficients but allows heterogeneity of the short-run adjustment parameters. The results suggest that levels of educational human capital, proxied by high school enrollment rates, have a robust positive impact on steady-state levels of income. This is true for male and female education, and the regressions also suggest that states which have larger gender-gaps in education have lower steady-state incomes. The estimated relationship is robust to the inclusion of alternative measures, added controls, and variation in the degree of state coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we develop a simple model to show that consumption of PDS food grains is significantly different between rich and poor households in states in which the PDS functions relatively well; in states in which the PDS is non-functional, the difference is not significant. Using household-level data from three recent thick rounds of the consumption expenditure survey (2004–2005, 2009–2010, and 2011–2012), we find evidence in support of the predictions from the model. This suggests that one way to make the PDS functional is to make it more accessible to poor and underprivileged households. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using survey data from the Cooch Behar district of West Bengal, the paper documents the impact of the rural employment guarantee scheme in reducing rural out-migration. Using regression framework and case studies, it finds no significant impact of household participation in the programme on migration decision. However, extent of participation in terms of number of days of work and earnings has a significant negative impact on short-term migration but not on longer duration ones. The findings lay emphasis on effective implementation in terms of asset creation, reduction in rationing of works and tackling delayed payments to enjoy its potential benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper presents econometric tests of a neoclassical competitive profit function model using Farm Management Studies data from the Ferozepur district of Punjab (India) for 1969/70. The aim of the paper is twofold: firstly, to test for differences in production and market behaviour of small (tenant) and large (owner) farms, and secondly, to test the validity of competitive profit-maximising models for the agricultural sector of a less developed country. The model is estimated by Zellner's 'Seemingly Unrelated Regressions' method with restrictions within and across equations. Our results suggest that the neoclassical model works very poorly and that we need to explore alternative avenues of research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

India has seen high levels of unemployment in recent years. Understanding how an episode of job loss affects household consumption expenditure is important for designing effective safety net programs. We apply difference-in-difference and quantile regressions to a high-frequency panel data from a nationally representative survey of 1,75,000 households in 2019 to estimate the impact of a job loss on household consumption expenditure – for urban and rural households, and households across different expenditure levels. We find that the loss of employment of an earning member leads to a significant immediate decline in household consumption expenditure. The decline is larger for urban households and households in the lowest and the highest income deciles. Durable and discretionary expenses go down the most. Expenditure on health and education also goes down significantly, especially, in urban areas. Our findings highlight the high vulnerability of urban households to economic shocks and can inform the design and targeting of income support and other safety-net programmes in India and other developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study provision of schools in the Indian setting and the challenges associated with a heterogeneous society when local communities play an active role in provision. Based on the political economy literature we expect more fragmented communities to have weaker collective action. We hypothesise that this weak tendency to act collectively impacts different schools differently depending on the extent of their reliance on local community action. Consistent with our expectation, we show that there are fewer schools financed by local community (private and local government schools) in fragmented districts. Presence of public schools, provided by state and central government, for which the community has little discretionary financing powers, is not impacted. However, since public schools rely on active community action for monitoring of schools, they are found to be of poor quality. Exhaustive empirical tests have been performed to support the mechanism and discount alternative explanations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While a growing literature relates macro variation in corruption to ethnic divisions, existing studies have paid little attention to the possible existence of systematic micro variation in corruption along ethnic lines. This paper examines whether individual corruption experiences vary systematically depending on ethnic group affiliation and the nature of this possible variation. Empirical findings drawing on data for over 23,000 respondents in 17 African countries indeed suggest that individual corruption experiences vary systematically along ethnic lines. Belonging to influential ethnic groups – in terms of group size or economic/political standing – is associated with a greater probability of having experienced corruption. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]