In the U.S., the average 40 year old plant employs almost eight times as many workers as the typical plant five years or younger. In contrast, surviving Indian plants exhibit little growth in terms of either employment or output. Mexico is intermediate to India and the U.S. in these respects:...

What is the effect of cash injections during financial crises? Exploiting county-level variation arising from random weather shocks during the 1980s Farm Debt Crisis, we analyze and measure the effect of local cash flow shocks on the real and financial sector. We show that such cash flow shocks...

In this paper we show that the study of the farm size-productivity relationship hinges on the choice of productivity measure. Our main insight is that using yields, a partial measure of productivity, may not be informative for the size-productivity relationship because, in addition to total...

While India is distinctive among developing countries for its fast-growing service sector, sceptics have raised doubts about the quality and sustainability of this service-sector growth and its implications for economic development. We show, consistent with the views of the sceptics, that while...

The new trade theory emphasizes the role of market-share reallocations across firms ("stealing") in driving productivity growth, while the older literature focused on average productivity improvements ("learning"). We use comprehensive, firm-level data from India's organized manufacturing sector...

We examine the impact of political reservation for disadvantaged minority groups on poverty. To address the concern that political reservation is endogenous, we take advantage of the state-time variation in reservation in state legislative assemblies in India generated by national policies that...

This paper focuses on the contribution to recent narrowing of the gap between Northern and Southern economies in GDP/capita, shares in world trade and market capitalization attributable both jointly and single to China, India, and Brazil (the three currently largest rapidly growing Southern...

Using plant-level data from the Annual Survey of Industries (ASI) for the fiscal years from 1998-99 through 2007-08, this study provides plant-level cross-state/time-series evidence of the impact of employment protection legislation (EPL) on total factor productivity (TFP) and labor productivity...

The threat posed by smoking to health in India is severe. Already 1 in 5 of all adult male deaths and 1 in 20 of all adult female deaths at ages 30-69 are due to smoking and India will soon have 1 million smoking deaths a year. Increasing tobacco prices has been found to be the single most...

We examine the impact of electricity sector restructuring on the operating efficiency of coal-fired power plants in India. Between 1995 and 2009, 85 percent of coal-based generation capacity owned by state governments was unbundled from vertically integrated State Electricity Boards into state...