Class or caste? A study on the role of caste and wealth status in school choice decision

There is a strong political opinion in India in favour of replacing caste based affirmative action with an economic class based one. We contribute to this debate by looking at the interaction of caste and wealth in school choice. We show that too rich and too poor parents behave in the same way irrespective of their caste identities—rich parents sending their children to private schools while poor parents choosing public schools for their children. The caste identity, we find, plays a role for the school choice decision made by the parents belonging to the economic middle class. Among the economic middle class parents, the ones from the privileged castes send their children to private schools, while the children of the parents from the disadvantaged castes are sent to public schools. The result is robust to alternative definitions of privileged and disadvantaged castes. For school quality choice, however, we find a monotonic relationship between wealth and school quality.     

Social Affiliation and the Demand for Health Services: Caste and Child Health in South India

This paper assesses the role of social affiliation, measured by caste, in shaping investments in child health. The special setting that we have chosen for the analysis - tea estates in the South Indian High Range - allows us to control nonparametrically for differences in income, access to health services, and patterns of morbidity across low caste and high caste households. In this controlled setting, low caste households spend more on their children's health than high caste households, reversing the pattern we would expect to find elsewhere in India. Moreover, health expenditures do not vary by gender within either caste group, in contrast once again with the male preference documented throughout the country. A simple explanation, based on differences in the returns to human capital across castes in the tea estates is proposed to explain these striking results.     

Touch thee not: Group conflict,caste power and untouchability in rural India

We investigate the impact of community power on the practice of untouchability - the avoidance of physical contact – by upper and backward caste Hindus vis-à-vis ‘scheduled’ castes (SCs) in rural India. We hypothesize that an upper or Other Backward caste (OBC) household's propensity to practise untouchability is determined not solely by its own characteristics but, crucially, also by the inter-group distribution of resources across both caste and religious divides, via political contestation over behavioural norms. Our model predicts that greater collective resource endowment (power) of SCs, or that of Muslims and Christians, will reduce the likelihood of an upper caste or OBC household practising untouchability. A marginal redistribution of power from OBCs to upper castes may reduce it as well. Greater power of the combined upper caste and OBC bloc will increase it. Identifying a community's power with its population weighted land share, we find associations consistent with these predictions in data from the India Human Development Survey 2011–12.     

Affirmative action in education: Evidence from engineering college admissions in India

This paper examines an affirmative action program for “lower-caste” groups in engineering colleges in India. We study both the targeting properties of the program, and its implications for labor market outcomes. We find that affirmative action successfully targets the financially disadvantaged: the upper-caste applicants that are displaced by affirmative action come from a richer economic background than the lower-caste applicants that are displacing them. Targeting by caste, however, may lead to the exclusion of other disadvantaged groups. For example, caste-based targeting reduces the overall number of females entering engineering colleges. We find that despite poor entrance exam scores, lower-caste entrants obtain a positive return to admission. Our estimates, however, also suggest that these gains may come at an absolute cost because the income losses experienced by displaced upper-caste applicants are larger than the income gains experienced by displacing lower-caste students. Limited sample sizes in our preferred econometric specifications, however, prevent us from drawing strong conclusions from these labor market findings.     

Caste discrimination in the Indian urban labour market

This, the pioneering quantitative analysis of caste in the Indian urban labour market, examines the age-old problem of caste in the light of discrimination theory and government policy. Using a survey of workers in Delhi, the gross wage difference between ‘scheduled’ (untouchable) and ‘non-scheduled’ caste is decomposed into its ‘explained’ and ‘discrimination’ components and, from a model of occupation choice, into wage- and job-discrimination. Discrimination is found to exist, and to operate at least in part through the traditional mechanism, viz. assignment to jobs, with the scheduled castes entering poorly-paid ‘dead-end’ jobs. It is assisted by methods of recruitment based on contacts, prevalent in the manual occupation, which also cause past discrimination to carry over to the present. Its practice serves the economic interests of those who exercise a taste for discrimination.     

Women as agents of change: Female income and mobility in India

Economic globalization will give many women in developing countries access to steady and relatively remunerative employment for the first time, potentially shifting bargaining power within their households and changing the choices that are made for their children. This paper exploits a unique setting — a group of tea plantations in South India where women are employed in permanent wage labor and where incomes do not vary by caste — to anticipate the impact of globalization on mobility across social groups in the future. The main result of the paper is that a relative increase in female income weakens the family's ties to the ancestral community and the traditional economy, but these mobility enhancing effects are obtained for certain historically disadvantaged castes alone. Although the paper provides a context-specific explanation for why the women from these castes emerge as agents of change, the first general implication of the analysis is that the incentive and the ability of women to use their earnings to influence household decisions depends importantly on their social background. The second implication is that historically disadvantaged groups may, in fact, be especially responsive to new opportunities precisely because they have fewer ties to the traditional economy to hold them back.     

Assets versus Autonomy? The Changing Face of the Gender-Caste Overlap in India

Inter-group disparity in India is multifaceted; this paper focuses on gender and caste as two important indicators of disadvantage. An assessment of the contemporary state of the gender-caste overlap suggests that the economic condition of women continues to be defined and constrained by their caste status. At the same time, the traditional distinction between lower caste and upper caste women, based on the relative egalitarianism and greater freedom of movement of the latter, needs to be revised. The Dalit (low caste) women are the worst off, as they belong to a group that is materially at the bottom of the ladder; their relative deprivation is compounded by low levels of autonomy and greater exposure to domestic violence.     

Explaining Caste Differences in Private School Attendance

Using a nationally representative education survey, we explore caste differences in private school attendance in India. We find lower private school attendance among the disadvantaged castes—Scheduled Castes (SCs), Scheduled Tribes (STs) and Other Backward Castes (OBCs)—when compared with the non‐disadvantaged group (non‐SC/ST/OBC). Controlling for geographical location, household and individual level factors reduces the gaps in private school attendance considerably; however, the gaps remain quite large. We find that variation in parental education and household consumption expenditure explains a significant proportion of the observed gaps. For ST students, geographical location remains important in explaining the gap in private school attendance.     

POVERTY,ELITE HETEROGENEITY,AND THE ALLOCATION OF PUBLIC SPENDING: PANEL EVIDENCE FROM THE INDIAN STATES

In this paper, we explore how in India, the world's largest democracy, the presence of different elite groups—the dominant landed and capitalist elite, and the minority elite (who are the elected representatives of the marginalized women and low caste population)—could affect the nature and extent of public spending on various accounts, especially education. We argue that the productive cooperation between the capitalist elite and workers may induce capitalists to favor spending on education, while the landed elite tend to oppose investment in basic education because they are fearful of dilution of their political dominance by the educated poor. While the minority elite may tend to favor redistributive spending, including that on education, their effectiveness could be limited by their under‐representation in the government. Results from the Indian states for the period 1960–2002 provide support for these hypotheses.     

Public education and redistribution when talents are mismatched

In democratic countries, elected policymakers determine public spending. The level of public spending depends on taxes that are decided by a voting mechanism. Policymakers also decide how to allocate funds among different policies, such as public education and pure redistributive transfers. How are the levels of funding for public education and redistribution determined in the political process? What impacts do votes on these two policies have on inequality, growth and social mobility? We develop a politico-economic model that highlights a novel mechanism: public education provides opportunities for the children of the poor to be recognized for their talent. This reduces the probability of a mismatch, which takes place when individuals with low talent who come from rich families find jobs that should go to people with high talent (and vice versa). Hence, the poor may prefer public spending on education to direct redistribution, while the rich prefer redistribution, as education implies more competition for good jobs from the poor.     

INEQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY IN EARNINGS AND CONSUMPTION EXPENDITURE: THE CASE OF INDIAN MEN

The paper associates inequality of opportunities with outcome differences that can be accounted by predetermined circumstances which lie beyond the control of an individual, such as parental education, parental occupation, caste, religion, and place of birth. The non‐parametric estimates using parental education as a measure of circumstances reveal that the opportunity share of earnings inequality in 2004–05 was 11–19 percent for urban India and 5–8 percent for rural India. The same figures for consumption expenditure inequality are 10–19 percent for urban India and 5–9 percent for rural India. The overall opportunity share estimates (parametric) of earnings inequality due to circumstances, including caste, religion, region, parental education, and parental occupation, vary from 18 to 26 percent for urban India, and from 16 to 21 percent for rural India. The overall opportunity share estimates for consumption expenditure inequality are close to the earnings inequality figures for both urban and rural areas. The analysis further finds evidence that the parental education specific opportunity share of overall earnings (and consumption expenditure) inequality is largest in urban India, but caste and geographical region also play an equally important role when rural India is considered.     

The performance of politicians: The effect of gender quotas

This paper investigates whether the gender of elected politicians affects political outcomes at the municipal level. Relying on Italian administrative data from 1991 to 2009, we are able to instrument the gender of elected politicians using an institutional exogenous change: a gender quota in the candidacy list enforced only in a subsample of municipalities and for a short period of time. While the gender of politicians does not affect the general ‘quality of life’, proxied by the internal migration rate, it does increase significantly both the efficacy of policies targeting women and households, proxied by the fertility rate, and the efficiency of the municipal administration, proxied by the actual size of the administrative bodies. These results, which are robust to several specifications and checks, suggest that affirmative action enhancing gender equality in political representation may be beneficial not only in terms of social justice but also from a political outcome perspective.     

Opportunity is not everything

We experimentally investigate in village India how belief systems that hierarchize social groups affect the groups’ responses to economic opportunities. Earlier we found that making caste salient hurt low caste performance both absolutely and relative to the high caste's. To examine the possible role of mistrust, we manipulate the scope for discretion in rewarding performance. When offered a gamble in which success mechanically triggers rewards, making caste salient has no significant effect. Instead, it is in the case with scope for discretion that making caste salient creates a large caste gap in the proportion of subjects who refuse the gamble.     

Caste, Inequality, and Poverty in India

This paper analyses inequality and poverty in India within the context of caste‐based discrimination. It does so by decomposing the difference between (caste) Hindu and Scheduled Caste (SC) and Scheduled Tribe (ST) households in: their average household incomes; their probabilities of being in different income percentiles; their probabilities of being at different levels of poverty into: a “discrimination effect”, which stems from the fact that a household's income level, into which its (income‐generating) profile translates, depends on whether it is SC/ST; an “attributes (or residual) effect” which stems from the fact that there are systematic differences between SC/ST and Hindu households in their (income‐generating) profiles. The results, based on unit record data for 28,922 households, showed that at least one‐third of the average income/probability differences between Hindu and SC/ST households was due to the “unequal treatment” of the latter.     

Economic development and the decline of rural and urban community‐based networks*

This paper studies how traditional networks in rural and urban India have responded to economic development. In rural areas, the impact of the Green Revolution on within‐network inequality has resulted in defection by the wealthiest members of caste‐based social insurance networks. In Bombay, the most able members of the caste‐based labour market networks are exiting from the traditional occupations to participate in new occupations in which individual rather than group ability is rewarded. In both cases, the weakest members of the community are left in networks that now have lowered capacity to provide services.     

Responsiveness to priority-based affirmative action policy in school choice

We consider the priority-based affirmative action policy in school choice. We weaken the responsiveness to affirmative action policy by requiring at least one minority student to be weakly better off when their priorities are improved. We find that under both the student-proposing deferred acceptance mechanism and the top trading cycles mechanism at least one minority student becomes weakly better off when their priorities are improved. We also strengthen the responsiveness to affirmative action policy by requiring all minority students to be weakly better off when their priorities are improved. We call this property strict responsiveness to affirmative action policy. We find that there is no nonwasteful, individually rational, mutually best, and strategy-proof mechanism that is strictly responsive to affirmative action policy. We then find a sufficient condition for the affirmative action policy to satisfy for the student-proposing deferred acceptance mechanism to be strictly responsive to affirmative action policy by setting restrictions on the priority improvements made by the policy.     

Can gender quotas break down negative stereotypes? Evidence from changes in electoral rules

In this paper, we analyze the effect of gender quotas on women's involvement in political activity by using a rich data set providing information on all Italian local administrators who were elected from 1985 to 2007. Gender quotas were introduced by law in Italy in 1993 and were in force until 1995. Because of the short period covered by the reform, some municipalities never voted under the gender quota regime. This allows us to identify a treatment and a control group and to estimate the effects of gender quotas by using a difference-in-differences estimation strategy. Our estimates show that women's representation in politics after the reform increased significantly more in municipalities that were affected by the reform than in municipalities that were not affected. This result also holds true if we exclude from our analysis elections which took place during the period in which the reform was in force. Moreover, the higher women's representation in “gender quota municipalities” is not related to the advantages that women who were elected during the reform have obtained from incumbency and does not seem to be driven by differences in temporal trends between Southern and Northern regions. These findings suggest that affirmative actions can be of use in breaking down stereotypes against women.     

Is there a role for caste and religion in food security policy? A look at rural India

This paper finds that factors such as caste and religion influence food security at the regional level. Thus defining affirmative action within food security programs may be necessary as the current practice of designing food security programs around the poverty line is shown to deliver limited results. In this regard, another lack of consideration is region-specific analysis within the rural areas which shows varied influence, thereby cautioning against a ‘one size fits all’ general policy of the central government. Evidence also shows that socio-economic factors and social assistance programs had different impacts on calorie gap depending on one's nutritional status. This nonlinear relationship has been neglected in most studies on food security and thus raises doubt on past assessment and policy implications.     

Caste at Birth? Redefining Disparity in India

Using household information in the National Family and Health Survey (NFHS) 1992/93 data, this paper examines regional variations in intercaste disparity in India. Based on five variables that are indicators of the standard of living of the three major caste/tribe groups identifiable in the data, a "caste deprivation index" is constructed that can be reversed to read as a "caste development index." Mapping the regional variation in this index, the paper makes a plea for focusing on caste as an essential ingredient in the study of stratification patterns in India's population.     

Grain inflation: Identifying agent discretion in response to a conditional school nutrition program

Many incentive programs rely on local agents with significant discretion to allocate benefits. We estimate the degree of discretion exercised by teachers within a conditional transfer program designed to improve nutrition and encourage student attendance in Mumbai, India. The program allocates grain to students every month their attendance exceeds 80% , creating an incentive for teachers to inflate attendance to benefit certain students. We find that teachers manipulate students' records, altering the incentives to attend school. The teachers' response also varies across students. Teachers inflate more for girls, better students, and students from lower castes, but less for Muslim students.