research

Caste operates as an occupational prestige hierarchy, yet caste disparities are usually measured only through wages and employment. Using India-calibrated occupational prestige scores built with the Nam-Powers-Boyd methodology and PLFS 2024 data, this paper finds residual prestige penalties of about 4 points for Scheduled Castes, 2.7 for Scheduled Tribes, and 2.2 for Other Backward Classes, and 5.3 points for women, after controlling for education, demographics, and state and industry fixed effects. Urban labour markets show larger caste and gender penalties than rural areas despite higher baseline prestige, a pattern the paper calls stratified modernisation.

India’s headline digital statistics suggest near-universal connectivity, but binary access metrics mask deep inequalities in how well people are connected and what they can do online. Using unit-level microdata from the NSS 80th Round Comprehensive Modular Survey on Telecom (2025, N = 106,631 adults), this paper constructs a Multidimensional Digital Deprivation Index across access, quality, skills, and functionality using the Alkire-Foster method. It finds that 78 percent of adults are multidimensionally digitally deprived, with Scheduled Tribes, Scheduled Castes, and Other Backward Classes facing substantially higher deprivation than upper-caste groups, driven largely by the quality dimension.

Most people worldwide say income differences are too large, yet how strongly they want government to act varies enormously. Using the ISSP 2019 (N = 34,204 across 29 countries), this paper shows that affective responses – anger about inequality and political cynicism – are among the strongest correlates of redistribution demand, while meritocratic beliefs and expected mobility central to the Benabou-Tirole and POUM frameworks are smaller and not robust to their inclusion. The perception-demand gap is widest where optimistic mobility beliefs are least warranted by actual data, suggesting the Meltzer-Richard puzzle is tied more to affect than to cognitive beliefs.

What counts as the best film depends on who decides. Using newly compiled screenplay co-award data and logistic regression on 900 films across four Indian award institutions (1954-2025), this paper documents a gradient in the screenplay-Best Film overlap, from 93 percent at the Oscars down to 5-13 percent at the National Film Awards, separating institutions with broad electorates from a government-appointed expert jury. The overlap evidence, which requires no regression assumptions, shows that voting architecture shapes quality certification.

This paper provides the first decomposition of India’s intergenerational earnings persistence into its transmission channels. Using the IHDS panel (2005-2012) and 6,183 matched father-child pairs, it estimates an intergenerational earnings elasticity of about 0.54, placing India among the least mobile economies, and finds that education and occupation account for only 19 percent of male earnings persistence – far below the United States, Great Britain, and China – rising to 46 percent once education-quality proxies are added. Most of the elasticity therefore works through unobserved channels such as wealth transfers, caste-based hiring networks, and marriage endogamy.

This paper asks whether the design of a rule change governs its effect on scoring and competitive balance, comparing two innovations in franchise Twenty20 cricket: the IPL’s Impact Player rule, which relaxes the eleven-player roster constraint, and the BBL’s Power Surge, which rearranges the fielding powerplay. Using ball-by-ball data from more than 1,900 matches and an interrupted time series design with difference-in-differences support, it finds the roster-relaxing rule raises scoring by roughly 8 percent while the fielding-restriction rule has no aggregate effect, and neither rule shifts win margins, leaving competitive balance intact.

Does educational expansion open the class structure of a society stratified by caste? Using the IHDS (2005 and 2011-12; 37,000 father-son pairs), this paper decomposes intergenerational class mobility and treats caste as a second axis of origin alongside class. Educational expansion did not raise social fluidity, and the direct caste advantage – concentrated entirely in the urban private sector, where upper-caste men are 2.6 times likelier than Scheduled-Tribe men to reach private salaried jobs – grows across generations. As good jobs shifted from public to private, caste advantage moved beyond the reach of affirmative action: reservations were outflanked by privatization.

This paper tests whether overeducated workers use low-requirement jobs as stepping stones to better-matched occupations in India’s segmented labour market. Using a quarterly panel of 33,667 urban workers from the PLFS 2017-18, it finds overeducated workers have 83 percent higher odds of upward occupational mobility and 60 percent lower odds of demotion, with a similar gradient across formal and informal sectors but lower baseline mobility in informal employment. Upward movers are predicted to gain about 16 percent in wages, and the pattern replicates across three independent panels spanning 2005-2023.

This paper examines how households’ position in the income distribution shapes institutional trust and political participation across rural and urban India, using household fixed-effects models on the IHDS panel (2004-05 and 2011-12) – to its knowledge the first within-household estimates of the inequality-trust-participation link in a developing democracy. Relative income position does not robustly predict governance trust once district heterogeneity is absorbed, but upward income mobility decreases interpersonal social trust, a social distancing pattern. Governance trust strongly predicts panchayat attendance and voting, with dense civic infrastructure redirecting trust erosion toward civic organisations rather than withdrawal.

This paper examines the relationship between AI exposure and employment outcomes in India, providing evidence from a developing country context where labor market institutions, informality, and the nature of AI adoption may produce different employment effects.

This paper examines the relationship between innovation and internationalisation strategies of emerging-market firms, investigating how firms in developing economies navigate the dual challenges of innovating while expanding internationally.

This paper examines inter-generational persistence of economic status and the role of assortative marriages in India, investigating how marriage patterns contribute to the reproduction of inequality across generations.

This paper analyzes the returns to education-occupation mismatch in the presence of widespread informality in the Indian labor market, investigating how the informal sector mediates the relationship between educational qualifications, occupational placements, and earnings outcomes.