[go: up one dir, main page]
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/oxecpp/v61y2009i1p52-73.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Keeping up with the Vaishyas? Caste and relative standing in India

Author

Listed:
  • Fredrik Carlsson
  • Gautam Gupta
  • Olof Johansson-Stenman
Abstract
People care about relative, and not only absolute, income. This paper investigates the importance of relative income within and between castes in the Indian caste system, using a choice experimental approach. The results indicate that slightly more than half of the marginal utility of income comes from some kind of relative income effects, on average. This is comparable to the results from previous studies in other countries. Belonging to a low caste and having a low family income are associated with higher concern for relative income. Moreover, an increase in the mean income of the caste to which the individual belongs, everything else held constant, reduces utility for the individual. Thus, the negative welfare effect of having a reduced relative income compared to the own caste average income dominates the positive welfare effect due to increased relative income of the own caste compared to the income of other castes. Copyright 2009 , Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Fredrik Carlsson & Gautam Gupta & Olof Johansson-Stenman, 2009. "Keeping up with the Vaishyas? Caste and relative standing in India," Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford University Press, vol. 61(1), pages 52-73, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:oxecpp:v:61:y:2009:i:1:p:52-73
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/oep/gpn015
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    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:oup:oxecpp:v:61:y:2009:i:1:p:52-73. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/oep .

    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.