We investigate the effects of a large government-initiated debt relief program on ex-ante and ex post credit market efficiency. We use loan accounts data for a large sample of borrowers before and after a nation-wide debt relief program in India. Employing robust regression discontinuity design,...

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 whether measures of audit quality are able to measure the quality of audit in banks. We make use of a unique setting where the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) provided an accurate measure of asset quality in banks. We first attempt to establish that the RBI revealed asset quality is a...

I examine whether higher creditor rights prevent strategic default. Borrowers who cross either of two thresholds are exempt from a creditor rights law in India. Using a loan day-level dataset, I find that loan performance is better when the law applies and that outperformance increases after a...

We ask whether machine learning algorithms improve the efficiency of screening of the loan officers, and thereby help expand access to formal credit. We obtain loan application level data from an Indian bank. To overcome the selective labels problem, we exploit the incentive driven within...

Using an unexpected government regulation that restricted the ability of micro-finance institutions to recover loans in one Indian state, we examine whether this intervention impacted bank loan performance. The bank loan delinquency rate increased significantly as a result. In response, the...