Publications by authors named "Amit Basole"

Unlabelled: The COVID-19 pandemic created a need for high-frequency employment and income data. Policy-makers and researchers of developing countries typically have not had access to such data. In India, a new private high-frequency panel dataset has recently emerged as the dataset of choice for analysis of the economic impact of COVID-19.

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Historical experience suggests that a sustained rise in per capita incomes and improvement in employment conditions is not attainable without a structural transformation that moves surplus labour from agriculture and other informal economic activities to higher productivity activities in the non-farm economy. In this paper, I analyse India's performance from a cross-country comparative perspective, estimating the growth semi-elasticity of structural change. Using a cross-country panel regression, I estimate the effectiveness of growth in moving workers away from agricultural and informal activities as compared to other developing countries at similar levels of per capita income.

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The Covid-19 pandemic has created unprecedented disruptions in labour markets across the world including loss of employment and decline in incomes. Using panel data from India, we investigate the differential impact of the shock on labour market outcomes for male and female workers. We find that, conditional on being in the workforce prior to the pandemic, women were seven times more likely to lose work during the nationwide lockdown, and conditional on losing work, eleven times more likely to return to work subsequently, compared to men.

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Viewed in the plane of the cortical surface, the visual cortex is composed of overlapping functional maps that represent stimulus features such as edge orientation, direction of motion, and spatial frequency. Spatial relationships between these maps are thought to ensure that all combinations of stimulus features are represented uniformly across the visual field. Implicit in this view is the assumption that feature combinations are represented in the form of a place code such that a given pattern of activity uniquely signifies a specific combination of stimulus features.

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Stimulus features such as edge orientation, motion direction and spatial frequency are thought to be encoded in the primary visual cortex by overlapping feature maps arranged so that the location of neurons activated by a particular combination of stimulus features can be predicted from the intersections of these maps. This view is based on the use of grating stimuli, which limit the range of stimulus combinations that can be examined. We used optical imaging of intrinsic signals in ferrets to assess patterns of population activity evoked by the motion of a texture (a field of iso-oriented bars).

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