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Purpose: According to the Government of India's Ministry of Labour and Employment Report (2015), almost 90% of the Indian workforce can still be categorized as informally employed, generating approximately 50% of the national product. Challenges with data availability have made a rigorous analysis of the informal economy in India often difficult and inadequate for policy formulations. This study aims to fill the gap by providing an empirical analysis of the informal economy in India using micro-data from the World Bank's Informal Enterprise Surveys. Design/methodology/approach: The authors contribute by empirically testing the association between the adoption of digital technology (payments) and firm performance proxied by firm sales. Matching models are used to mitigate sample selection bias arising out of simultaneous sample selection. Findings: The results suggest that the participation in digital platforms, namely, use of digital payment instruments, is associated with higher sales for firms. The results of this study also show that adoption of digital payments helps in both situations – whether a firm has been using digital technology or has just started using it since the outbreak. Research limitations/implications: More in-depth data over time, spanning across more cities of India, is needed to conduct a further detailed investigation. Social implications: The results should allow policymakers in India to reconsider youth-centric and women-centric business needs, even within the informal sector, which does not often enter the purview of the government but remains responsible for the growth and sustenance of 90% of the country's workforce. If further research on this issue could engage with the impact of demonetization of currency in 2016 as a lagged shock on sales and reestimate subsequent growth, it would perhaps offer a wider spectrum of how the performance of the informal economy in India affects the entire economy, which has over the last four years and before the onset of Covid reported slower growth. Originality/value: Productivity is measured in terms of sales of informal firms in India in a regular month or in recent period like last month. Adoption of technology such as making payments using digital platforms can enhance productivity of firms by lowering standard transaction costs and time spent for visiting banks or financial institutions. Albeit not extensively, the literature has investigated digital technology adoption in the context of firms achieving comparative advantage (D'Ippolito et al. 2019; Scuotto et al. 2017), firms generating value creation (Magistretti, Dell'Era and Petruzzelli, 2019), and in helping with strategic initiatives and agility of firms (Ghezzi and Cavallo, 2018; Piccoli and Ives, 2005). Nonetheless, it would incur certain fixed costs, including acquiring skills and awareness, to manage digital platforms. In addition, physical access to instruments such as smartphones or computers and internet connectivity are prerequisites for productivity enhancements. Firms belonging to the informal sector in India generally face these challenges but may also benefit significantly following successful adoption. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study to conduct a preliminary empirical analysis of the impact of digital technology adoption on the performance of informal sector firms in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND Although literacy rates in India have improved for both men and women, less is known about the evolution of gender disparities across different levels of educational attainment. OBJECTIVE The goal is to determine whether gender gaps in schooling outcomes have narrowed, widened, or remained unchanged across birth cohorts. METHODS With a multinomial logit specification, we compare six education outcomes for people born to the 1956-1960, 1961-1965, ..., and 1986-1990 cohort groups. Our empirical tests indicate whether the gender gaps have narrowed, widened, or remained unchanged across the cohort groups. RESULTS We find evidence of narrowing gender gaps for some but not all education outcomes. The gender gaps narrow for not attending school, attending primary school, and primary school completion, but they persist for secondary school completion, attending college, and college completion. CONCLUSIONS Although we observe improvements in the gender gaps in schooling outcomes toward the lower end of the education spectrum, gender inequities associated with higher levels of schooling persist across cohort groups. It is important to understand the causes of these patterns, as there are likely important policy considerations for India as it grapples with the interactions among technological change, a relatively young workforce, and persistent gendered norms and attitudes. CONTRIBUTION The paper makes two noteworthy contributions. First, we show that gender progress in schooling outcomes is not uniform across different levels of educational attainment. Second, our cohort study framework provides a simple test for progress (or lack thereof) in education and other settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do perceived obstacles about corruption matter for Indian firms when it comes to their probability to innovate? Using World Bank Enterprise Survey firm-level data, we show that a unit rise in corruption perception of firms in India lowers innovation rate by about 1 percent. The result is important in terms of policy implementation because recent studies have shown that perceived obstacles can affect firms' probability to innovate. Such analysis is missing in the Indian context where both big and petty corruption is rampant. Our results further show that perceptions about financial barriers matter only when firms also view corruption to be bad. Perceived difficulty in accessing credit in conjunction with corruption perception lowers probability of innovation by 4 percent. This is also true for nonfinancial perceived obstacles of firms. The results remain robust to alternate identification strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In December 2012, a young student was gang-raped on a bus in Delhi. Since then media attention has been directed toward raising awareness about crimes against women in India. But data shows that domestic violence and not rape is India’s number one reported crime over the last decade. An incidence of domestic violence, legally defined as “cruelty by husband or his relatives,” is reported once every five minutes. This paper attempts to prospectively examine the association between several risk factors and domestic violence in India. We utilize a comprehensive, national database, viz. the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-3) and focus on a sample of 69704 ever-married women between the ages of 15-49. A limited dependent variable model was used to estimate the effects. The dependent variable is a dichotomous variable indicating whether a respondent has faced any form of violence (both physical and emotional). Benchmark results and robustness checks indicate that several socio-economic and demographic factors are significantly associated with the likelihood of facing domestic violence. Factors that matter are educational attainment by the female as well as the husband, her employment status, the employment status of the husband, and demographic factors like caste and religion. A broad investigation indicates that among a comprehensive set of socio-economic and demographic variables that affect the susceptibility of ever-married women to domestic violence, women’s exposure to intergenerational violence, and alcohol consumption by the partner emerge as significant risk factors. The results remain robust even with choice of sub-samples based on educational differences between the partners. There is ample anecdotal evidence to suggest that excessive alcohol consumption is a national problem. Policy options have varied between outright prohibition and the use of tax instruments to curb excessive alcohol consumption. Apart from these, other positive interventions could emphasize on adverse health impacts and children’s well-being to bring about a sustainable behavioral change in partners. In addition to empowering women to break the cycle of domestic violence, one possible policy solution calls for the use of medical settings as an intervention point for children exposed to such violence. In order to support practitioners, NGOs and governmental agencies could identify best practices and disseminate such information to communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]