This paper examines who contributes and who persists in contributing in a national, voluntary, defined contributory pension program, where the government provides the incentive of matching contributions of a minimum amount (USD 16). The paper uses proprietary data from a financial services firm...

Recent events in India have brought a fresh focus upon the problem of regulation in the field of micro-finance. This paper delineates the three distinct aspects where government needs to play a role. The first is to protect the rights of the micro-borrower, the consumer of micro-financial...

Regulation of retail finance has been the subject of policy interventions in several countries, including India. Much of the regulatory change in India has been carried out with little support of empirical evidence. This paper is motivated by questions of the evidence of losses due to mis-sales...

In this article, we study conditional heteroscedasticity in a market index on the Bombay Stock Exchange, from April 1979 to March 1995. We find strong evidence of heteroscedasticity in daily, weekly and monthly returns. The conditional variance of all three data series seem best approximated by...

In 2003, trading of commodity futures shifted from single commodity, regional exchanges to national exchanges that trade multiple commodities. This paper examines price discovery and hedging effectiveness of commodity futures after this change and concludes that,on average, futures prices do...