The paper analyzes causes of movements in Indian wages for rural unskilled male laborers, and assesses their impact on inflation. Theoretical priors derived from an analytical framework based on the concepts of fair wages, salience and over-reaction are tested using a State level rural wage data...

This note provides an estimate of incidence of poor and poverty risk in India across NSS regions for 2004-05 and 2009-10 in rural and urban areas. It raises concern on increasing poverty risk and also incidence of poor in some regions. These are not necessarily among the relatively worse-off...

In December 2010, the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh passed a law that severely restricted the operations of micro-finance institutions and brought the micro-finance industry to an abrupt halt. We measure the impact of micro-credit withdrawal in this unique natural experiment and find that...

International sugar trade is of strategic importance to India as it helps in maintain stability in the domestic sugar prices despite the cyclicality in production. Also, the potential for expanding sugar production in India exists and can be fully exploited if adjustments were introduced to...

Using an example we show that the Revenue Equivalence in the Scoring Auctions, as postulated by Che (1993), no longer holds when the suppliers are asymmetric in their costs of production.

The paper analyzes the potential rise of new reserve currencies in the context of the economic and political determinants of an international currency. Two models analyze the role of soft political power, switching costs to a new currency and transaction costs in the rise of a new currency....

The paper explores the contribution of innovations to Indian growth. Inclusive innovations aid catch-up and close productivity gaps. An analytical framework helps to characterize policies that contribute to such innovations. Recent telecommunication and mobile banking policies are assessed...

Labour regulations like employment protection legislation in India are size-dependent rules and therefore constitute a basis for threshold effects. Firms could use non-permanent workers to stay below the legal establishment size threshold of 100 workers. This strategy is expected to cause the...

This paper presents two approaches that use publicly available data to estimate the loss to investors from mis-selling of insurance products. The first approach uses the number of lapsed policies from the annual reports of the insurance regulator, IRDA, while the second method uses the...

This study examines the moral economy of firm-farmer contracts in contract farming schemes in India, bringing together data from field surveys, conducted between 2007 and 2010, of 42 agribusinesses and 484 contract farmers from multiple commodity sectors. The central argument of this paper is...