Real estate markets in emerging economies are beset with price opacity, low transaction volumes and perverse incentives on tax evasion, leading to acute shortage of reliable price information. In this paper, we overcome the paucity of reliable price information in emerging markets through a...

Ideally land and buildings ought to be preferred collateral for lenders in India, as in many other countries, due to the ease of valuation and disposal of land in the event of default. Data shows that land is a collateral in a large proportion of loans in India, yet the several structural,...

We examine whether internet search intensity, as captured by Google’s Search Volume Index (SVI), predicts house price changes in an emerging market like India. Emerging markets have low internet penetration and high information asymmetry with a dominant unorganized real estate market. Like in...

It is hard to estimate housing supply elasticities. India is a particularly useful country to study housing supply because it is large and has a variety of housing typologies. We estimate the supply elasticity of non-durable, durable, and vacant residential housing units in urban India. We use...

We show that pro-tenant rent control laws increase the rural-urban wage gap by reducing rural-urban migration in India. Migrants are more likely to rent when they move to cities. Rent control laws reduce the supply of rental housing, thereby increasing the costs of migration to cities....

This paper demonstrates that India’s early 2000s mobile phone service expansion, or the “telecom boom” led to net rural-urban migration of about 13 million individuals out of which 4 million moved for employment. To estimate the effects, we exploit the heterogeneous expansion of telecom...

We study the effects of a positive wealth shock due to a series of state and federal reforms that granted equal inheritance rights to Indian women on the quantity and quality of children and son preference. Using a difference-in-differences methodology, we find that women who were affected by...

Affordable housing is a problem that many countries are taking stock of, world over. In India, the problem is much more stark with an estimated shortage of around 18 million houses, with 99% of this in the economically weaker sections of society. This paper sets out the definitions of affordable...