Working Paper
Quality of routine essential care during childbirth
Objective: To evaluate the quality of essential care during normal labour and childbirth in maternity facilities in Uttar Pradesh, India. Methods: Between 26 May and 8 July 2015, we used clinical observations to assess care provision for 275 mother...
Blog
Peer influence and human capital accumulation: Evidence from Delhi University colleges
by
Smriti Sharma, Saurabh Singhal, Subha Mani, Utteeyo Dasgupta
December 2017
College is an important milestone in life that is believed to develop several aspects of an individual's human capital, broadly defined to include...
Working Paper
Subjective income expectations and risks in rural India
This paper analyses the pattern and determinants of income risk and expectation in rural India. It uses unique primary survey data eliciting subjective income distribution from households in twelve villages in Bihar. It finds that expected future...
Working Paper
Explaining cross-state earnings inequality differentials in India
Despite the relevance of geographical disparities in India, earnings inequality occurs mostly within states, but with a broad range of variability in its levels. We investigate the sources of such variability using RIF decompositions of the...
Journal Article
The gendered crisis
THIS ARTICLE IS ON EARLY VIEW | This article studies the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the gendered dimensions of employment and mental health among urban informal-sector workers in Delhi, India. First, the study finds that men’s employment...
Working Paper
A (time) series of unfortunate events: structural change, globalization, and the rise of occupational injuries
There is a dearth of evidence on the evolution of occupational health in the developing world and on the extent to which it has been influenced by (1) the pattern of structural transformation in these economies and (2) integration with global markets...
Working Paper
Marriage market responses in the wake of a natural disaster in India
This paper examines the impact of the 2001 Gujarat earthquake on age at marriage and other assortative matching outcomes. Using the 2004–05 wave of the India Human Development Survey and employing a difference-in-differences strategy, we document...
Blog
Urban poverty: cities, slums, and the need for policy action
by
Emily Rains, Anirudh Krishna
October 2022
Developing countries will be predominantly urban by 2030. While urbanization is historically associated with development and broad-based social...
Blog
Want to catch up on UNU-WIDER research? Here are 10 of the most interesting papers published over the last year
In this blog, the managing editor of the WIDERAngle shares his personal view on some of the most important —and potentially overlooked— work recently...
Working Paper
The COVID-19 pandemic and poor women’s agency
Studies on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic have demonstrated that poor women have been the worst sufferers in terms of pay cuts and job losses. Women are the hardest hit also at the household level. They have to bear the brunt of constrained...
Blog
In memory of Ela Ramesh Bhatt — The gentle revolutionary
by
Martha Chen
November 2022
Ela Ramesh Bhatt, the founder of the Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) of India, passed away on 2 November 2022. Known as the ‘gentle...
Working Paper
Minimum wages and changing wage inequality in India
Using nationally representative data on employment and earnings, this paper documents a fall in wage inequality in India over the last two decades. It then examines the role played by increasing minimum wages for the lowest skilled workers in India...
Blog
Social mobility among disadvantaged groups in India
In recent decades, India has experienced rapid economic growth alongside radical affirmative action programs enacted since independence. This column...
Working Paper
India’s economic development since independence
When India became a republic in 1950, the economy was primarily agrarian, with three-fifths of output originating from agriculture. In the sixty years since independence, there has been a significant transformation of economic activity away from...
Working Paper
India’s development cooperation in Africa
This paper examines multiple facets of New Delhi’s development cooperation with countries in Africa and argues that grassroots organizations in India that find innovative, low-cost technological solutions to developmental challenges can help...
Working Paper
Who was impacted and how? COVID-19 pandemic and the long uneven recovery in India
We investigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on income levels, poverty, and inequality in both the immediate aftermath and during the uneven recovery until December 2021 using high-frequency household survey data from India. We find that the...
Journal Article
Multigenerational mobility among males in India
Most studies of intergenerational mobility focus on adjacent generations, and there is limited knowledge about multigenerational mobility—status transmission across three generations. We examine multigenerational educational and occupational mobility...
Working Paper
Is economic development affected by the leaders’ education levels?
Although formal education is often considered an indicator of political leaders’ quality, the evidence on the effectiveness of educated leaders is mixed. Besides, minimum education qualifications are increasingly being used as requirements for...
Blog
Can access to finance spur entrepreneurship in Indian informal sector?
by
Ira N. Gang, Rajesh Raj Natarajan,
Kunal Sen
May 2022
Credit constraints, a consequence of the widespread failure of credit markets in developing countries, are widely regarded as a key constraint to...
Working Paper
Elementary education in India versus China
This paper documents the state of elementary education in India and China since the 1960s, key lessons for India from China’s shift in focus from ‘quantity’ to ‘quality’, and evidence-based guidelines for effective implementation of India’s New...
Working Paper
The impact of affirmative action in India and the United States
This paper provides a systematic review of quantitative literature investigating the success of affirmative action policies in addressing socio-economic inequalities between ethnic groups in education and employment. We focus on two of the most...
Blog
COVID-19 in India: cases, deaths, and vaccinations
The Omicron variant resulted in a third major wave of Covid-19 in India, with the number of cases exceeding those in the second wave, albeit causing...
Background Note
COVID-19 and socioeconomic impact in Asia
Several countries have enacted lockdown measures in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic to protect their health systems and reduce the number of mortalities. One of the most extreme national lockdown measures has been taken by the government of India...
Working Paper
Childbirth and women’s labour market transitions in India (revised)
The impact of childbirth on women’s employment has been discussed extensively in the context of developed countries. Constraints on mothers’ labour market participation and consequent fall in earnings are characterized as the ‘motherhood penalty’...
Blog
Kanika Mahajan – IEA featured economist interview
by
UNU-WIDER
September 2021
Kanika Mahajan, a researcher engaged in UNU-WIDER's project on 'The changing nature of work and inequality', is the August 2021 featured economist of...
Working Paper
The gender productivity gap
We examine the patterns and correlates of the productivity gap between male-owned and female-owned firms for informal enterprises in India. Female-owned firms are on average 45 per cent less productive than male-owned firms, with the clearest...
Working Paper
The gendered crisis: livelihoods and mental well-being in India during COVID-19
This paper studies the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the gendered dimensions of employment and mental health among urban informal-sector workers in India. First, we find that men’s employment declined by 84 percentage points post-pandemic relative...
Working Paper
Childbirth and women's labour market transitions in India
The impact of childbirth on the labour market participation of women has been discussed extensively in the context of developed countries, constraints on mothers’ labour market participation and earnings being characterized as the ‘motherhood penalty...
Working Paper
Women’s inheritance rights and time use
This paper examines the impact of the Hindu Succession Act on married women’s time use in India. The Hindu Succession Act was amended between 1976 and 2005 by giving equal inheritance rights to women for inheriting property. To estimate the effect of...
Working Paper
The legal basis for affirmative action in India
The affirmative action policy in India came into practice because of the generations of struggle undergone by the untouchable castes and other backward classes, who were historically excluded from education and administration. As society changed, it...
Working Paper
Norms that matter
Based on primary data from India, this paper analyses the reasons underlying women’s low labour force participation. In developing countries, women engaged in unpaid economic work in family enterprises are often not counted as workers. Women are...
Working Paper
Technology and clientelist politics in India
This paper argues that new computer, smartphone, and universal ID technologies are reducing the incentives for political clientelism in the delivery of social programmes in India, especially by allowing party leaders to bypass local brokers to credit...
Working Paper
Cognitive, socioemotional, and behavioural returns to college quality
We exploit the variation in the admissions process across colleges of a leading Indian university to estimate the causal effects of enrolling in a selective college on: cognitive attainment using scores on standardized university exams; behavioural...
Working Paper
Using legal empowerment for labour rights in India
This paper brings labour back into the literature on legal empowerment against poverty. Employing a historical lens, I outline three waves of legal movements. Each wave is distinguished by its timing, the state-level target, and the actors involved...
Journal Article
Norms that matter
Part of Journal Special Issue
Women’s Work
Working Paper
Behind the numbers: exploring caste inequities in entrepreneurial success
The documented under-representation of marginalized groups in business ownership and the labour market is a concerning issue. This study explores how caste disparities in small-firm entrepreneurship impact on firm performance in India, focusing on...
Working Paper
Income mobility in the developing world
This paper examines income mobility in developing countries. We start by synthesizing findings from the available evidence on relative mobility and poverty dynamics. We then describe evidence on economic mobility obtained via synthetic panels...
Working Paper
Digital technologies and ‘value’ capture in global value chains
This paper examines whether digitalization can be a driver of ‘upgrading’ in global value chains and help developing countries move into higher value-added activities. In particular, the paper provides empirical evidence on the impact of digital...
Seminar
Evaluating the impact of training in a national microfinance program: Self help groups in India
Presented by: Dr Ranjula Bali Swain (Department of Economics, Uppsala University). Abstract This paper evaluates the impact of widespread training programs provided by the Self Help Group (SHG) program. Indian SHGs are mainly NGO-formed microfinance...
Wed, 30 January 2013
UNU-WIDER,
Helsinki,
Finland
Past event
Book Chapter
Landholding pattern and nature of work
Chapter in book: Wives and Widows at Work: Women’s Labour in Agrarian Bengal, Then and Now Compared with most other Indian states, women’s reported work participation rates have historically been low in West Bengal. This trend is more prominent in...
Working Paper
Degrees of disadvantage
This study is positioned in two strands of literature—intersectionality and social mobility. It is the first to measure (dis)advantage at the individual level as an outcome of the intersectionality of identities and parental circumstances. By linking...
Working Paper
Barriers or catalysts? Traditional institutions and social mobility in rural India
We examine how village-level social group dominance affects the educational and occupational mobility of minority and other social groups in rural India across multiple generations. We distinguish between upper caste and own-group dominance and...