In December 2010, the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh passed a law that severely restricted the operations of micro-finance institutions and brought the micro-finance industry to an abrupt halt. We measure the impact of micro-credit withdrawal in this unique natural experiment and find that...

This paper presents two approaches that use publicly available data to estimate the loss to investors from mis-selling of insurance products. The first approach uses the number of lapsed policies from the annual reports of the insurance regulator, IRDA, while the second method uses the...

This paper examines the existing implementation of the National Pension Scheme against the goals with which it was created. It finds that there are certain critical areas in which the NPS has deviated. These include multiplicity of schemes, lack of investment choice, low transparency of the...

What is the role of financial regulation in the field of micro-finance? This paper identiles two features of micro-finance which call for unique treatment in policy considerations as compared to policy thinking in the mainstream body of financial law. These features are credit recovery and the...

In response to the Second Micro Finance Crisis in Andhra Pradesh, which took place in October 2010, the Ministry of Finance has pro- posed a new Micro Finance Institutions (Development & Regulation) Bill. This paper undertakes a detailed analysis of the draft Bill in terms of both economic...

Recent events in India have brought a fresh focus on the appropriate regulatory stance towards micro-finance. In this paper, we review facts and recent experience about Indian microfinance. We analyse the puzzles of financial regulation in this field from first principles, and argue that the...

Recent events in India have brought a fresh focus upon the problem of regulation in the field of micro-finance. This paper delineates the three distinct aspects where government needs to play a role. The first is to protect the rights of the micro-borrower, the consumer of micro-financial...

The causal impact of algorithmic trading on market quality has been difficult to establish due to endogeneity bias. We address this problem by using the introduction of co-location, an exogenous event after which algorithmic trading is known to increase. Matching procedures are used to identify...

Distance-to-default (DtD) from the Merton model has been used in the credit risk literature, most successfully as an input into reduced form models for forecasting default. In this paper, we suggest that the change in the DtD is informative for predicting change in the credit rating. This is...

This paper examines transactions costs in buying versus selling using a large database of snapshots of the limit order book. On the equity spot market, there is clear evidence of asymmetry in liquidity: transactions costs are lower for buy market orders when compared with sell market orders. In...