IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ess/wpaper/id766.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Teacher Truancy in India: The Role of Culture, Norms and Economic Incentives

Author

Listed:
  • Kaushik Basu

Abstract

Social scientists often emphasize how ‘culture’ and ‘social norms’ can be important determinants of economic behavior and development. This raises questions of the relative importance of economic incentives and these other more social variables, like culture, and of how they interact with one another. This paper uses some recent stylized facts concerning the problem of teacher truancy in India and constructs a simple model to illustrate the interaction between the ‘economic’ and the ‘social.’ It discusses how this enriches our view of policy-making for improving economic performance. [This is text of the Vera Anstey Memorial Lecture, delivered by the author at the 88th Annual Conference of the Indian Economic Association in Visakhapatnam, on 28 December 2005.] BREAD Working Paper 112. [The paper will appear in a forthcoming issue of Indian Economic Journal.]

Suggested Citation

  • Kaushik Basu, 2006. "Teacher Truancy in India: The Role of Culture, Norms and Economic Incentives," Working Papers id:766, eSocialSciences.
    • Handle: RePEc:ess:wpaper:id:766
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.eSocialSciences.com/data/articles/Document126122006430.7555353.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Assar Lindbeck & Sten Nyberg & Jörgen W. Weibull, 1999. "Social Norms and Economic Incentives in the Welfare State," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 114(1), pages 1-35.
    2. S. N. Durlauf, "undated". "The Memberships Theory of Poverty: The Role of Group Affiliations in Determining Socioeconomic Outcomes," Institute for Research on Poverty Discussion Papers 1221-01, University of Wisconsin Institute for Research on Poverty.
    3. Basu, Kaushik, 2005. "Labor Laws and Labor Welfare in the Context of the Indian Experience," Working Papers 05-17, Cornell University, Center for Analytic Economics.
    4. Abhijit Banerjee & Kaivan Munshi, 2004. "How Efficiently is Capital Allocated? Evidence from the Knitted Garment Industry in Tirupur," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 71(1), pages 19-42.
    5. Besley, Timothy & Coate, Stephen, 1992. "Understanding welfare stigma: Taxpayer resentment and statistical discrimination," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 48(2), pages 165-183, July.
    6. Kaushik Basu, 2006. "Labor Laws and Labor Welfare in the Context of the Indian Experience," Economic Studies in Inequality, Social Exclusion, and Well-Being, in: Alain Janvry & Ravi Kanbur (ed.), Poverty, Inequality and Development, chapter 0, pages 183-204, Springer.
    7. Basu, Kaushik, 2003. "Prelude to Political Economy: A Study of the Social and Political Foundations of Economics," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780199261857.
    8. Kaushik Basu (ed.), 2004. "India's Emerging Economy: Performance and Prospects in the 1990s and Beyond," MIT Press Books, The MIT Press, edition 1, volume 1, number 0262025566, April.
    9. Basu, Kaushik & Van, Pham Hoang, 1998. "The Economics of Child Labor," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 88(3), pages 412-427, June.
    10. Basu, K. & Genicot, G. & Stiglitz, J., 2000. "Unemployment and Wage Rigidity when Labor Supply is a Household Decision," Papers 00-01-11, California Irvine - School of Social Sciences.
    11. Sethi, Rajiv & Somanathan, E, 1996. "The Evolution of Social Norms in Common Property Resource Use," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 86(4), pages 766-788, September.
    12. Michael Kremer & Nazmul Chaudhury & F. Halsey Rogers & Karthik Muralidharan & Jeffrey Hammer, 2005. "Teacher Absence in India: A Snapshot," Journal of the European Economic Association, MIT Press, vol. 3(2-3), pages 658-667, 04/05.
    13. Alain Janvry & Ravi Kanbur (ed.), 2006. "Poverty, Inequality and Development," Economic Studies in Inequality, Social Exclusion, and Well-Being, Springer, number 978-0-387-29748-4, November.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Edlund, Lena & Ku, Hyejin, 2011. "The African Slave Trade and the Curious Case of General Polygyny," MPRA Paper 52735, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 16 Dec 2013.
    2. Vimala Ramachandran & Suman Bhattacharjea & K M Sheshagiri, 2011. "Primary School Teachers: The Twists and Turns of Everyday Practice," Working Papers id:4303, eSocialSciences.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Kaushik Basu, 2016. "Beyond the Invisible Hand: Groundwork for a New Economics," Economics Books, Princeton University Press, edition 1, number 9299.
    2. Kaushik Basu & Gary S. Fields & Shub Debgupta, 2009. "Labor Retrenchment Laws And Their Effect On Wages And Employment: A Theoretical Investigation," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: Bhaskar Dutta & Tridip Ray & E Somanathan (ed.), New And Enduring Themes In Development Economics, chapter 9, pages 181-205, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    3. Tolciu, Andreia, 2008. "Is unemployment a consequence of social interactions? Seeking for a common research framework for economists and other social scientists," HWWI Research Papers 1-15, Hamburg Institute of International Economics (HWWI).
    4. Basu, Kaushik, 2006. "Participatory Equity, Identity, and Productivity: Policy Implications for Promoting Development," Working Papers 06-06, Cornell University, Center for Analytic Economics.
    5. Goto, Hideaki, 2011. "Social norms, inequality and child labor," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 40(6), pages 806-814.
    6. Karla Hoff & Mayuresh Kshetramade & Ernst Fehr, 2011. "Caste and Punishment: the Legacy of Caste Culture in Norm Enforcement," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 121(556), pages 449-475, November.
    7. Andreia Tolciu, 2010. "The Economics of Social Interactions: An Interdisciplinary Ground for Social Scientists?," Forum for Social Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 39(3), pages 223-242, January.
    8. Huck, Steffen & Kübler, Dorothea & Weibull, Jörgen, 2012. "Social norms and economic incentives in firms," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 83(2), pages 173-185.
    9. Matt Parrett, 2006. "An Analysis of the Determinants of Tipping Behavior: A Laboratory Experiment and Evidence from Restaurant Tipping," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 73(2), pages 489-514, October.
    10. Mari Rege & Kjetil Telle & Mark Votruba, 2012. "Social Interaction Effects in Disability Pension Participation: Evidence from Plant Downsizing," Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 114(4), pages 1208-1239, December.
    11. Joan Esteban & Laurence Kranich, 2003. "The Social Contracts with Endogenous Sentiments," Working Papers 71, Barcelona School of Economics.
    12. Fehr, Ernst & Falk, Armin, 2002. "Psychological foundations of incentives," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 46(4-5), pages 687-724, May.
    13. Basu, Kaushik, 2005. "Labor Laws and Labor Welfare in the Context of the Indian Experience," Working Papers 05-17, Cornell University, Center for Analytic Economics.
    14. Friedrichsen, Jana & König, Tobias & Schmacker, Renke, 2018. "Social image concerns and welfare take-up," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, vol. 168, pages 174-192.
    15. Stark, Oded & Fan, C. Simon, 2010. "Migration for degrading work as an escape from humiliation," MPRA Paper 28905, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    16. Jun-ichi Itaya & Kenichi Kurita, 2020. "Replicator Evolution of Welfare Stigma: Welfare Fraud vs. Incomplete Take-Up," CESifo Working Paper Series 8621, CESifo.
    17. Alois Stutzer & Rafael Lalive, 2004. "The Role of Social Work Norms in Job Searching and Subjective Well-Being," Journal of the European Economic Association, MIT Press, vol. 2(4), pages 696-719, June.
    18. Delprato, Marcos & Akyeampong, Kwame, 2019. "The effect of working on students’ learning in Latin America: Evidence from the learning survey TERCE," International Journal of Educational Development, Elsevier, vol. 70(C), pages 1-1.
    19. Kaushik Basu & Annemie Maertens, 2007. "The pattern and causes of economic growth in India," Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Oxford University Press and Oxford Review of Economic Policy Limited, vol. 23(2), pages 143-167, Summer.
    20. Huck, Steffen & Kübler, Dorothea & Weibull, Jörgen, 2001. "Social Norms and Optimal Incentives in Firms," Working Paper Series 565, Research Institute of Industrial Economics.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ess:wpaper:id:766. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Padma Prakash (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.esocialsciences.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.