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...

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...

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 paper examines the existing implementation of the National Pension Scheme against the goals with which it was created. It finds that there are certain critical areas in which the NPS has deviated. These include multiplicity of schemes, lack of investment choice, low transparency of the...

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...

What is the role of financial regulation in the field of micro-finance? This paper identiles two features of micro-finance which call for unique treatment in policy considerations as compared to policy thinking in the mainstream body of financial law. These features are credit recovery and the...