The challenge of employment in the Indian economy, especially after it growth acceleration since the mid-1980s, relates to its quality rather than its quantity. While employment growth has kept pace with the labour force over the long run, what has grown is informal employment. The coexistence...

This paper offers a unified analytical treatment of Marx's theory of ground-rent, building on the analysis that is available in Volume Three of Capital. Since ground-rent is a transformation of surplus profit generated in agriculture, the main argument is developed in two steps. In the first...

Bhaduri and Marglin (1990) had argued that an investment function which has the profit rate and the capacity utilization rates as the two determinants of investment imposes unwarranted restrictions on the macroeconomic model and rules out profit-led expansion. In this paper, I show that this...

In this note, I offer a simple way to think about the determination of equilibrium levels of price and output for the agricultural commodity that makes explicit two important dimensions: (a) the role of aggregate demand for the agricultural commodity, and (b) profit maximizing behaviour of the...

Omitted variable bias (OVB) of OLS estimators is a serious and ubiquitous problem in social science research. Often researchers use the direction of the bias in substantive arguments or to motivate estimation methods to deal with the bias. This paper offers a geometric interpretation of OVB that...

In this paper I discuss three issues related to bias of OLS estimators in a general multivariate setting. First, I discuss the bias that arises from omitting relevant variables. I offer a geometric interpretation of such bias and derive sufficient conditions in terms of sign restrictions that...

Kalyal Sanayal's work on postcolonial capitalism has been influential in many strands of critical social theory. In this brief note, I investigate three key components of his argument and find them wanting. In particular, I show that the evolution of land ownership in India does not support the...

This paper uses a novel empirical strategy to present empirical estimates of the effect of an exogenous shock to distribution on demand and accumulation for the US economy from 1973 to 2018. We use recursive vector autoregressions to identify the impact of shocks to the wage share. We impose...

Using a state-level panel data set on the incidence of hate crimes in India, this paper implements difference in difference (DID) and triple difference in difference (DDD) research designs to estimate the causal impact of the right-wing BJP's win in the 2014 parliamentary elections on hate...

This paper reconsiders two questions relating to India's economic growth: structural breaks in growth and the impact of equipment investment on aggregate economic growth. First, statistical tests of structural change show that economic growth in post-independence India has witnessed four...