Availability of seed, venture capital and bank finance for start ups and SMEs is one of the key factors determining the strength of the innovation system in any country. As India gears up to pass the Protection and Utilization of Public Funded IP Bill, it needs to closely study the availability...

India has an estimated 26,000 startups, making it the third-largest startup ecosystem in the world, recording consolidated inflows of over $36 billion in the past 3 years with 26 "unicorns" - startups valued over $1 billion. The Indian startup ecosystem has expanded quite rapidly mainly through...

Several recent studies demonstrate that Indian American immigrant entrepreneurs play an increasingly important role in the economic growth in the United States. In part due to the compelling evidence of entrepreneurial success amongst immigrants, there is a renewed interest among policy makers...

We examine the role of the Indian diaspora in the outsourcing of work to India. Our data are taken from oDesk, the world’s largest online platform for outsourced contracts. Despite oDesk minimizing many of the frictions that diaspora connections have traditionally overcome, diaspora...

Due to a legal challenge, there was a staggered introduction of fast track debt recovery tribunals (DRTs) across the states of India in the 1990s. Exploiting this plausibly exogenous variation in the efficiency of debt contract enforcement and using detailed information on product lines produced...

Intellectual Assets has become the pre-eminent resource for creating economic wealth. Intellectual Assets has contributed to the creation of whole new types of businesses and ways of doing business. In the Knowledge based industries many firms have large amounts of Intellectual Assets such as...

Poor women borrow from multiple sources. This study examines whether the source of debt matters for women’s role in household financial decisions. Drawing on a household survey from rural Tamil Nadu, we categorise women’s loans along the lines of accessibility and formality into ‘planned...

Poor women have complex financial lives. They borrow from a variety of sources. So far, however, research has focussed only on formal borrowing as a source of women’s empowerment. This study examines whether type of borrowing matters to women. We differentiate between ‘easy loans’ – that...