The Government of India initiated a program in 1994 to promote manufacturing in districts designated as backward. The way the backward districts were identified enables us to employ a regression discontinuity design to evaluate the impacts of the program. We find that the program's 5-year tax...

India has undertaken extensive reforms in its manufacturing sector in the last two decades. However, an acceleration of growth in manufacturing, and a concomitant increase in employment, has eluded India. What might be holding the sector back? Using Annual Survey of Industries data at the...

Using industry-level data disaggregated by states, this paper finds a positive impact of trade liberalization on labor-demand elasticities in the Indian manufacturing sector. These elasticities turn out to be negatively related to protection levels that vary across industries and over time....

We use cross-country panel data to examine the effects of a variety of nonpharmaceutical interventions used by governments to suppress the spread of coronavirus disease (COVID-19). We find that while lockdown measures lead to reductions in disease transmission rates as captured by the...

This paper examines the relationship between urban agglomeration and firm innovation using a recently developed dataset that consistently measures city boundaries across Asia together with geo-referenced firm-level data. It finds that the spatial distribution of innovation by firms is highly...

This paper shows that the endogeneity bias that allegedly appears when estimating production functions using value data, and which the literature has tried to deal with since the 1940s, is simply the result of omitted-variable bias due to a poor approximation to an accounting identity. This...

Using industry-level data disaggregated by states, this paper finds a positive impact of trade liberalization on labor-demand elasticities in the Indian manufacturing sector. These elasticities turn out to be negatively related to protection levels that vary across industries and over time....

this paper argues that the true cause of the endogeneity bias that allegedly appears when estimating production functions, and which the literature has tried to deal with since the 1940s, is s imply the result of omitted-variable bias due to an incorrect approximation to an accounting identity....

this paper argues that the true cause of the endogeneity bias that allegedly appears when estimating production functions, and which the literature has tried to deal with since the 1940s, is s imply the result of omitted-variable bias due to an incorrect approximation to an accounting identity....