Suchergebnisse

AbstractThis paper documents the changing structure of wages in India over the post-reform era, the roughly two-decade period since 1993. To investigate the factors underlying these changes, a supply-demand framework is applied at the level of the Indian state. While real wages have risen across India over the past two decades, the increase has been greater in rural areas and, especially, for unskilled workers. The analysis finds that, in rural areas, the changing wage structure has been driven largely by relative supply factors, such as increased overall education levels and falling female labor force participation. Relative wage changes between rural and urban areas have been driven largely by shifts in employment, notably into unskilled-intensive sectors like construction.JEL Classification:J21, J23, J24, J31

Surface irrigation is a common pool resource characterized by asymmetric appropriation opportunities across upstream and downstream water users. Large canal systems are also predominantly managed by the state. This paper studies water allocation under an irrigation bureaucracy subject to corruption and rent-seeking. Data on the landholdings and political influence of nearly a quarter million irrigators in Pakistan's vast Indus Basin watershed allow the construction of a novel index of lobbying power. Consistent with a model of misgovernance, the decline in water availability and land values from channel head to tail is accentuated along canals having greater lobbying power at the head than at the tail.

Groundwater is a vital yet threatened resource in much of South Asia. This paper develops a model of groundwater transactions under payoff uncertainty arising from unpredictable fluctuations in groundwater availability during the agricultural dry season. The model highlights the trade-off between the ex post inefficiency of long-term contracts and the ex ante inefficiency of spot contracts. The structural parameters are estimated using detailed micro-data on the area irrigated under each contract type combined with subjective probability distributions of borewell discharge elicited from a large sample of well-owners in southern India. The findings show that, while the contracting distortion leads to an average welfare loss of less than 2 percent and accounts for less than 50 percent of all transactions costs in groundwater markets, it has a sizeable impact on irrigated area, especially for small farmers. Uncertainty coupled with land fragmentation also attenuates the benefits of the water-saving technologies now being heavily promoted in India.

Household panel data document a remarkable closing of the
gender gap in school enrolment in rural Pakistan between 2001 and 2004.
During this 3-year period, there was an 8 point increase in the
percentage of girls entering school, while the corresponding increase
for boys was less than 2 percentage points. More than half of the rise
for girls can be explained by the substantial increase in household
incomes, whereas comparatively little is accounted for by increased
school availability. Unpacking these enrolment trends and their
determinants requires solving the classic period-age-cohort
identification problem. The paper shows how to do so using auxiliary
information on the distribution of school entry ages. JEL
Classification: O15, O40, I 25, I21 Keywords: School Enrolment, Gender,
Income Growth, Gender Gap

Can marriage institutions limit marital inefficiency? We study the pervasive custom of watta satta in rural Pakistan, a bride exchange between families coupled with a mutual threat of retaliation. Watta satta can be seen as a mechanism for coordinating the actions of two sets of parents, each wishing to restrain their son-in-law. We find that marital discord, as measured by estrangement, domestic abuse, and wife's mental health, is indeed significantly lower in watta satta versus "conventional" marriage, but only after accounting for selection bias. These benefits cannot be explained by endogamy, a marriage pattern associated with watta satta. (JEL J12, J16, O15, O18, Z13)