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This paper examines the consequence of affirmative action for a "middle" ranked group on equity and the leader's overall performance or "efficiency." The literature on electoral quotas is invested in the equity question for disadvantaged groups, but is mostly silent on this issue. We use a randomized electoral quota for an intermediately ranked caste group (OBCs) in a large state in India to show that overall, such a quota does not affect delivery of public projects, or redistribute projects away from disadvantaged groups (SC/STs). Moreover, we show that when the group is large, the quota may in fact improve leader's performance. The improvement in overall performance does not come at a cost of lower allocation to the most disadvantaged group. We argue and provide suggestive evidence that when the group is large, such a quota for the group increases within-group electoral competition in villages. The result highlights that "efficiency" concerns regarding affirmative action may need reevaluation. It further justifies the targeting of electoral quota policy in India towards jurisdictions where the group is numerous. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the association between studying science in higher secondary school and labor market earnings in India. Studying science in high school is associated with 22% greater earnings than studying business or humanities. Earnings for science students are further enhanced with some fluency in English. Science education is also associated with more years of education, completing a professional degree, returns to entrepreneurship and working in public sector positions. Primary survey of high school students shows no discernible differences in behavioral characteristics of science students compared to others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates if better access to secondary education increases enrollment in primary schools among children in the 6–10 age group. Using a household level longitudinal survey in a poor state in India, we find support for our hypothesis. Using recent methods developed to assess the impact of omitted variable bias on the estimated coefficient, we show that correction for a bias emanating from endogenous placement of schools leaves our conclusions unchanged. Moreover, the marginal effect is larger for poorer households and boys (who are more likely to enter the labor force). We also provide some suggestive evidence that this effect may be quite widespread in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We exploit the implementation of India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme to identify exogenous shifts in mothers' labor force participation and its impact on their children's educational outcomes. Using child level panel data, we find that a mother's participation in the labor force increases her children's time spent in school and leads to better grade progression. These results account for age cohort trends and for differences in time trends by initial levels of economic development at the district and sub-district levels. We find evidence of greater household decision-making power of working mothers as an explanation of our results. Jel codes: D1, I21, I38, J16 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) in India is one of the largest public employment programs in the developing world. It was introduced by the central government led by Indian National Congress (INC). While it's implementation is, in principle, based on demand for work from households, we investigate how political competition affects intra district allocation of funds under the scheme. Using longitudinal data on funds allocated to blocks and elections held for block councils, we find that greater amount of funds were allocated to blocks where INC had lower seat share. Further, we address the issue of endogeneity by focusing on a subsample of blocks where the aggregate vote share of INC was close to that of it's rivals. Our results suggest that 1.5 percentage point more funds were approved for blocks that had 1 percentage point lower seat share for INC. We also provide a mechanism for the effect by showing that the results are only true when the MP of the district, a member of the body that approves the block fund allocation, is from INC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Concomitant with higher levels of urbanisation in developing countries, there has been a sharp increase in both the number of urban poor and slum dwellers. In line with Millennium Development Goals, the focus of policymakers has primarily been on slum dwellers. Using a nationally representative dataset from India, we compare well-being of people living in slums with those living in non-slum urban areas. We argue that while policies to improve access to water and sanitation in slums are justifiable, livelihood programmes that target only the slums would miss the poorest living in non-slum urban areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we show that local redistribution of educational resources via teacher transfers between neighboring public schools can improve equity in access to teachers. Transfers from teacher surplus schools to deficit schools within a 10 km radius in Haryana, a state of India for which we have geo-coded location of schools in 2013, enables 19 percent of deficit schools to meet the minimum requirement. We use the mandated norms in the Right to Education Act in India, to define deficit and surplus schools. In the process we also provide a characterization of schools that are in deficit and those in surplus. We find that connectedness, the social composition of the enrolled students, the income of the neighborhood are important determinants of a school being in deficit. Surplus schools mirror the results on deficit, but not always so: they are far more heterogenous, leading to possibilities that they may in fact be no different than some low shortage deficit schools. Keeping in the background this heterogeneity in surplus schools, we design local transfers between schools and evaluate them on how well they match characteristics of the donor and recipient schools. The chosen algorithm is compared to another transfer rule that reduces the variance of shortages across schools and is found to be better in matching characteristics, that is, the donor and recipient schools are, on an average, matched in characteristics: in terms of the development of the region, its rural/urban location, connectivity and school characteristics. A comparison of transfers that follow our redistribution rule to transfers resulting from an actual transfer policy shows that while our rule removes deficits in rural areas, the actual transfers favored more developed regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]