Using two novel administrative datasets containing monthly sales and input-sourcing information for plants and products with regional heterogeneity within India, we find that the inter- to intra-region trade ratio declines sharply after the COVID-19 induced lockdown in March 2020. The ratio...

Zipf's law is a well-known empirical regularity of firm size distribution. To date, it remains a puzzle as to what is the identity of the firms that causes this regularity. We document the multi-plant firm origin of Zipf's law - plants of multi-plant fi rms (exponent close to one) are more...

Firms are increasingly concerned about the resilience of their sales and sourcing decisions as conflicts, natural disasters, and labor disputes frequently disrupt trade. Using administrative tax data, we show that a temporary disruption in trade due to state border closures in India led to a...

Information provision for social welfare via cheap technological media is now a widely available tool used by policy makers. Often, however, an ample supply of information does not translate into high consumption for information due to various frictions in demand, possibly stemming from...

High-Frequency Traders (HFTs) are known to facilitate incorporating information into asset prices. Do they utilize aggregate market-wide information or idiosyncratic stock-specific information? In this paper, we exploit novel transaction-level data from the National Stock Exchange (India), a...

In 1994, due to environmental concerns, Germany banned a chemical called ‘Azodyes’, a primary input for the leather and textiles firms in India (a key exporter). Exploiting this as a quasi-natural experiment, we examine the effects of this crossborder regulatory change on labor compensation,...

Governments around the world engage in fiscal interventions targeting the poor. Using a rich dataset on income and consumption of Indian households, we estimate the distributional effects of such interventions in a heterogeneous agent model. The standard scheme of interventions that consistently...

Is there a trade off while influencing borrowing behavior vis-á-vis consumption by cash transfers? We consider the case of Telangana, an Indian state, which saw implementation of an unconditional cash transfer to change the borrowing behavior of agricultural land-owners – the transfer amount...