Using a policy experiment in India, we examine the impact of a third party audit on tax compliance. Employing the generalized difference-in-difference methodology, we find that growth in tax payment is 58 percentage points higher under a regime with no third party audit. The fact that the...

We examine the effects of CEO turnover in banks. Incoming bank CEOs face problems from information asymmetry because banks' operations are opaque and bank risk can change dramatically in a short time. Incoming bank CEOs may therefore change bank policies to manage their personal risks. Since CEO...

Using official national-level survey data, we investigate the impact of a large debt waiver program in India on beneficiaries savings and consumption. We find that the household consumption level and pattern are unaffected by the waiver. Plausibly anticipating higher credit constraints in the...

We study the impact of derivatives on stock characteristics such as valuation, price efficiency, and liquidity. We resolve the endogeneity issue faced in the extant literature by using an order issued by the Indian market regulator that resulted in delisting of 51 stocks from the derivative...

Using actual voting records of simultaneous elections held for Indian federal and regional assemblies -- where same political parties contest against each other in both type of elections -- we identify swing voters. We find that the representatives supported by swing voters outperform...

Though the monetary policy transmission and financial intermediation literatures have respectively highlighted the role of the “bank credit channel” and relationship banking, the effect of relationship banking on the transmission of monitory policy has not been investigated. In this paper,...

We investigate the impact of a large scale debt waiver program for small agricultural borrowers in India on the short term and long term consumption levels of the beneficiaries. We obtain consumption data from three national level surveys conducted before and after the waiver by a federal...

While persistence of political dynasties in a democracy has received attention, the performance of dynasts remains unstudied. using a regression discontinuity (RD) framework, we compare dynastic representatives, who defeat non-dynastic candidates by a close margin with non-dynastic...

Using actual voting records of simultaneous elections held for Indian federal and regional assemblies-where same political parties contest against each other in both type of elections we identify non-committed voters. These are split ticket voters who vote for different parties in two different...