27 November, 2025Is Language a bridge or barrier? Linguistic distance and the health of women and children
India is a linguistically diverse country with a large flow of internal migrants. This article demonstrates that the greater the “linguistic distance” between a woman’s native language and the d...
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Advaith Jayakumar Anisha Sharma 
10 November, 2025
- Articles
Markets, marriage, and norms: Understanding female labour force participation in India
Despite recent gains in India’s female labour force participation rate due to rural self-employment, women’s work in the country remains constrained by factors on both the demand and supply side. ...
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Farzana Afridi
- 03 November, 2025
- Perspectives
How dowry shapes migration decisions in modern India
While migration is a critical driver of economic development, it may disrupt arrangements wherein parents rely on sons for old-age support. Leveraging new survey data, this article shows that at the t...
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Natalie Bau Gaurav Khanna Alessandra Voena
- 23 October, 2025
- Articles
Fifteen years of gender budgeting in India: A Retrospective
In this year’s Union Budget, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced that she will constitute a committee to evaluate 15 years of gender budgeting. It entails looking at the budget through the...
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Ashok Lahiri
- 29 October, 2019
- Videos
Coping with a policy shock in rural South India: Social networks as a determinant of trust
Trust and participation in social networks are inherently interrelated. This article identifies the determinants of trust in rural South India, where a mechanism of coping with shocks through transact...
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Anne Hilger Christophe Jalil Nordman
- 21 October, 2019
- Articles
Closing gender gaps in India: Does increasing women’s access to finance help?
Gender gaps in women’s economic opportunities – in the labour market and in entrepreneurship – have remained high in India. This article analyses the macroeconomic impact of closing gender gaps ...
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Purva Khera
- 16 August, 2019
- Articles
Inequality of opportunity among Indian women
Inequality of opportunity (IOp) in any society is that part of overall inequality which arises from factors beyond an individual’s control such as parental education, caste, gender, religion etc. Th...
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Akanksha Choudhary Gowtham Muthukkumaran Ashish Singh
- 05 August, 2019
- Articles
Prevalence and evolution of dowry in India
Dowry payments are an important part of household finances in India, typically exceeding a year of earnings. This article analyses data from an all-India sample of over 70,000 marriages to document fa...
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Gaurav Chiplunkar Jeffrey Weaver
- 24 June, 2019
- Articles
Traditional hierarchies and affirmative action in a globalising economy: Evidence from India
India has had a long-standing policy of affirmative action to address deep-rooted caste inequities and discrimination. This article compares successive age cohorts of three broad social groups – Sch...
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Ashwini Deshpande Rajesh Ramachandran
- 21 June, 2019
- Articles
Women’s work and fertility: Evidence from 200 years, 103 countries
The declining rates of female labour force participation in developing countries in the last two decades have led researchers to focus on the role of fertility in women’s labour supply decisions. Us...
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Daniel Aaronson Rajeev Dehejia Andrew Jordan Cristian Pop-Eleches Cyrus Samii Karl Schulze
- 03 June, 2019
- Articles
Where are the Indian female politicians?
When women win elections, does it inspire other women to run for candidacy or does it convince men to close ranks before the next election?
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Lakshmi Iyer
- 24 May, 2019
- Podcasts
The road not taken: Gender gaps along paths to political power
Research and policy efforts towards greater female political participation have largely focused on women’s voting behaviour, and their representation as elected public officials. However, there are ...
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Lakshmi Iyer Anandi Mani
- 21 May, 2019
- Articles
The 10% quota: Is caste no longer an indicator of backwardness?
The Constitution (124th Amendment) Bill 2019 seeks to provide for the advancement of “economically weaker sections”, through 10% reservation in government jobs and higher educational institutions ...
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Ashwini Deshpande Rajesh Ramachandran
- 17 May, 2019
- Articles
A family affair: Family members’ role in female employment decisions in India
A factor behind low female labour force participation in India is family members’ objection to women working. Based on an experiment in Karnataka, this article assesses whether employers can use lig...
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Joshua Dean Seema Jayachandran
- 13 May, 2019
- Articles
Sparking the #MeToo revolution in India: Delhi's 'Nirbhaya' case
In 2012, anger erupted on the streets of Delhi following the violent rape and murder of a young woman. This article estimates the impact of the incident on the reporting of crimes against women in Del...
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Akshay Bhatnagar Aparna Mathur Abdul Munasib Devesh Roy
- 29 April, 2019
- Articles
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Hindu-Muslim fertility differentials in India: An update
Building on past research, Saswata Ghosh and Pallabi Das estimate the state- and district-level fertility differentials between Hindus and Muslims using data from the latest round of the NFHS. They sh...
- Pallabi Das Saswata Ghosh
- 18 April, 2023
- Articles
A division of labourers: Caste identity and efficiency in India
Castes in India are closely associated with certain occupations and determine the jobs done by millions. This study uses a new dataset to show that a large proportion of workers still work in their ca...
- Guilhem Cassan Daniel Keniston Tatjana Kleineberg
- 18 November, 2022
- Articles
Measuring caste inequality across Indian states
Although recent research on inequality shows that upper castes have the highest levels of material well-being, there is a wide variation in caste inequality across India. Measuring three forms of cast...
- Poulomi Chakrabarti
- 13 September, 2021
- Articles