National Council of Applied Economic Research
This study attempts to estimate and analyse the level of health-care expenditure incurred by the state governments and households in the rural sector of major states in India. It studies the interlinkage between public spending and household spending on health care. The utilisation of public and private facilities has also been analysed to provide a... Read More
This paper studies the idea (hypothesis) that increasing government spending on education should improve the quality of the education and access and thus bridge the gap between the private schools and public schools’ performance leading to indifferent choice between the school types and similar outcome. Nationally representative village, schools, and household level data from rural... Read More
This paper models the perverse impact of increased devolution of funds from higher to lower level governments (village councils or Panchayats) on tax revenues collected This paper models the perverse impact of increased devolution of funds from higher to lower level governments (village councils or Panchayats) on tax revenues collected by the latter. We show... Read More
In this paper we show that investments to improve the supply and management of water reduce the time spent in fetching water by both men and women, which in turn will lead to a reallocation of the time saved to productive activities, and result in increased incomes. Using the national ARIS/REDS panel data of the... Read More
Has the devolution of responsibilities and finances to local governments in India produced positive impacts on health status and incomes of men and women? Using a national data set with details on health, health seeking behavior and local governance, we estimate a system of simultaneous equations to analyze the incidence of illness via a health... Read More
While many studies explored impacts of political quotas for females on public goods provision, knowledge on immediate and longer term economic impacts of such interventions remains limited which is undesirable in view of the widespread adoption of such policies. We use nation-wide data from India on current outcomes and a village’s reservation status for the... Read More
Although there has been considerable interest on wage discrimination, available studies largely dealt with formal rather than informal markets that are of little relevance for the poorest. Focusing on of India’s informal labour markets leads to three findings of interest. First, gender wage discrimination is larger in informal than in formal labour markets, resulting in... Read More
This paper studies the changes in the pattern of bilateral trade between China and India consequent to China's accession to the WTO in 2001 and assesses the complementarities and challenges in trade.
Reservations enjoy great popularity to overcome deep-rooted inequality. However, in part due to a short horizon of analyses, evidence on the impact of reservations and the mechanisms through which they may work remains ambiguous. Nationally representative village- and household level data from India for the last 3 Panchayat periods allow us to explore dynamic effects... Read More
This paper explores the impacts of the amendment to the 1956 Hindu Succession Act on Hindu females’ intergenerational transfers of physical and human capital. Information on the timing of three generations’ key life events helps isolate the causal effects. Our primary estimation strategy is a difference-indifference estimator in which we compare the share of total... Read More
