TY  - RPRT
        AU  - Duleep, Harriet
        TI  - The Labor/Land Ratio and India's Caste System
        PY  - 2012/May/
        PB  - Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
        CY  - Bonn
        T2  - IZA Discussion Paper
        IS  - 6612
        UR  - https://www.iza.org/publications/dp6612
        AB  - This paper proposes that India's caste system and involuntary labor were joint responses by a nonworking landowning class to a low labor/land ratio in which the rules of the caste system supported the institution of involuntary labor. The hypothesis is tested in two ways: longitudinally, with data from ancient religious texts, and cross-sectionally, with twentieth-century statistics on regional population/land ratios linked to anthropological measures of caste-system rigidity. Both the longitudinal and cross-sectional evidence suggest that the labor/land ratio affected the caste system's development, persistence, and rigidity over time and across regions of India.
        KW  - labor-to-land ratio
KW  - population
KW  - involuntary labor
KW  - immobility
KW  - value of life
KW  - marginal product of labor
KW  - market wage
        ER  -