We propose a joint model to combine models for hospital visits and out-of-pocket medical expenditures. It allows for the presence of non-linear effects of covariates using splines to capture the effects of aging on healthcare demand. Sample heterogeneity is modeled robustly with the random...

This article examines the average cost function for property and casualty insurers. Cost function describes the relationship between a firm’s minimum production cost and outputs. The comparison of cost functions could shed light on the relative cost efficiency of individual firms, which is of...

We study how consumer spending responds to digital payments, using the differential switch to digital payments across consumers induced by the sudden 2016 Indian Demonetization for identification. Usage of digital payments rose by 3.38 percentage points and monthly spending increased by 3% for...

Using a staggered installation of sanitary pad vending machines across schools in the Indian state of Kerala, we study the impacts of free monthly access to sanitary pads on girls’ educational outcomes. We find that the number of dropouts among female students in the 7th-grade decrease by 24...

We utilize monthly individual-level financial data and item-level supermarket sales data to study how consumption responds to one of the costliest natural disasters in India. We find that consumption dropped by 11% during the disaster, 65% of which was recovered after the disaster. On average,...

The manager of an Indian business group (BG) fund can have access to private information on its own BG firms and their industries. However, since the fund belongs to a BG, the fund manager may also have incentives to undertake investments that benefit the BG firm managers and not its fund...

This paper exploits a natural experiment in India – Inflation Targeting to study how changes in inflation expectations influence households’ consumption, savings, and investments in risky assets. Using regional heterogeneity in inflation expectations by city and city-age-gender bins due to...

Does death teach us wisdom or defy the power of reason? Our paper aims to explore this fundamental question by examining investors’ decision framing in their account-level trading on the National Stock Exchange of India during the early pandemic period. We find that the first reported local...

Should political institutions concentrate power in more hands or a single hand? This paper provides microeconomic evidence on the relationship between multiple elected representatives and economic growth. We find that increasing the number of politicians governing an area leads to greater firm...

We argue that voters' political support for the ruling party shapes the transmission of fiscal policy measures that require households' action, especially when political polarization is high. We find that the take-up rates of a large-scale Indian loan-guarantee program (Mudra loans) are higher...