This paper utilizes a countrywide, county-to-city upgrade in the 1990s to identify whether extending the powers of urban local governments leads to better firm outcomes. The paper hypothesizes that since local leaders in newly-promoted cities have an incentive to utilize their new administrative...

Innovation is crucial to regional economic competitiveness and to productivity growth. A salient feature of the Indian economy is the geographic concentration of both, economic activity and innovation, as measured by patent activity. Theoretical models argue that the clustering of economic...

The distribution of economic activity over physical space - economic geography - is central to economic development. Geographical variations in industrialisation are the primary factor affecting geographical variations in incomes. And so, the question of what drives industry to locate in one...

<title>Abstract</title> Innovation is crucial to regional economic competitiveness and to productivity growth. A salient feature of the Indian economy is the geographic clustering of both economic activity and innovation. In this paper, I study to what extent the spatial distribution of economic activity...

This paper examines locational factors that increase the odds of a firm's entry into export markets and affect the intensity of its participation. It differentiates between two different sources of spillovers: clustering of general economic activity and that of export-oriented activity. It also...

We assess the location choices of 6020 foreign investors at the level of Indian districts. Employing conditional logit models, we find that clustering of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is driven strongly by herding among investors from both, the same and other countries of origin. However, the...

We offer a comprehensive analysis of the evolution of poverty by social groups in India since 1983 and study the impact of growth and openness on the headcount ratio. We show that at the national level poverty has declined with every successive quinquennial survey in both rural and urban areas...