Loss, Recovery and the Long Road Ahead: Tracking India's Informal Workers Through the Pandemic.

Drawing on results from a panel of 2778 workers interviewed during and after the 68-day hard lockdown imposed in India, the following study examines the livelihood impact of the pandemic and the extent of subsequent recovery or lack thereof. Focussing specifically on workers located in the informal economy, the study is a useful addition to the burgeoning body of work on the economic impacts of Covid-19 by providing an insight into the employment and earnings recovery of those located at the margins. These findings are spliced across socio-economic groups to showcase the differential impact of the pandemic on different demographics within the informal sector.

Distribution of self-reported health in India: The role of income and geography.

An important new large-scale survey database is brought to bear on measuring and analysing self-reported health in India. The most important correlates are age, income and location. There is substantial variation of health across the 102 'homogeneous regions' within the country, after controlling for household and individual characteristics.

Nowcasting India's Quarterly GDP Growth: A Factor-Augmented Time-Varying Coefficient Regression Model (FA-TVCRM).

Governments, central banks, private firms and others need high frequency information on the state of the economy for their decision making. However, a key indicator like GDP is only available quarterly and that too with a lag. Hence decision makers use high frequency daily, weekly or monthly information to project GDP growth in a given quarter.

The Indian Bidi Industry: Trends in Employment and Wage Differentials.

The bidi industry in India is predominantly an unorganized sector. It continues to enjoy tax benefits, arguably, to protect bidi workers' interests and employment. Our objective was to study trends in employment and wage differentials in the bidi industry using nationally representative data.

Gender discrimination in health-care expenditure: An analysis across the age-groups with special focus on the elderly.

This study aims to understand how much of the gender gap in hospitalization expenditure is explained by different socio-economic, demographic and health-care related factors across the age-groups with a particular focus on the elderly. The unexplained part of the gap (the coefficient effect) is assumed to arise purely due to gender bias. Gender inequality in health-care expenses has been well-documented particularly in case of developing countries and also for India separately.

Estimates of air pollution in Delhi from the burning of firecrackers during the festival of Diwali.

Delhi has had the distinction of being one of the most polluted cities in the world, especially in the winter months from October-January. These months coincide with the religious festival of Diwali. It is argued that air quality gets worse in the aftermath of Diwali on account of firecrackers that get burned during the festival.

A cross-country Exchange Market Pressure (EMP) dataset.

The data presented in this article are related to the research article titled - "An exchange market pressure measure for cross country analysis" (Patnaik et al. [1]). In this article, we present the dataset for Exchange Market Pressure values (EMP) for 139 countries along with their conversion factors, ρ (rho).

Maternal education, female labour force participation and child mortality: evidence from the Indian census.

The objective of this paper is to examine how child mortality changes with different levels of maternal education and to quantify the impact of material education and female labour force participation. Child mortality gradients, according to years of education, are rather steep at the primary education level for both male and female children. In post-primary stages of education incremental gains in mortality reduction are almost non-existent.