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
What explains gender disparities in economic participation in India?
The UN Global Gender Gap data shows that women’s economic participation and opportunity is worse in India than in 95% of all other countries studied. This column attempts to uncover what drives the ...
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Ejaz Ghani William Kerr Stephen D O'Connell
- 21 August, 2012
- Articles
The persistence of caste in India: An economic explanation
Despite many efforts by the government and by civic institutions, the caste system continues to have a firm hold on Indian society. This column presents an economic explanation for this persistence an...
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Kaivan Munshi
- 16 July, 2012
- Articles
Does Female Leadership Impact on the Quality of Public Goods? Evidence from a Public Poverty Alleviation Programme in Andhra Pradesh, India
This project used the nationwide policy of randomly allocating village council headships to women to identify the impact of female political leadership on the governance of projects implemented under ...
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Farzana Afridi Vegard Iversen M.R. Sharan
- 01 April, 2012
- IGC Research on India
Belief Formation of the Returns to Schooling and How to De-Bias Incorrect Beliefs
This project investigates how poor households in rural and urban Rajasthan form beliefs about the value of additional years of schooling.
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James Berry Lucas Coffman
- 31 March, 2012
- IGC Research on India
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Tweets by Ideas4IndiaMost Popular Social Identity Posts
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