Real estate markets are highly vulnerable to inflows of illicit wealth. The clandestine nature of dark money makes these activities difficult to detect and estimate. We exploit offshore data leaks – the Panama Papers – to study how associated individuals behave in housing transactions...

Using administrative account level data, we study the largest financial inclusion program in India that led to 255 million new bank account openings. About 77% of these accounts maintain a positive balance. While the initial usage remains quite infrequent, it gradually converges to that of...

This paper tests one specific monetary transmission mechanism through households: portfolio rebalancing. We use a unique panel dataset of household's credit and debit card spending, ATM withdrawals, financial investments into risky assets such as mutual funds and equities, as well as bank...

In this paper, we employ a unique tax experiment and dataset in a highly salient tax rate environment to examine consumer response to complex and uncertain tax reforms. Tax reforms raise some fundamental questions in public finance: How does consumption respond to tax change? How is the tax...

Measuring the consumption response to a tax regime has been a central issue in the optimal design of fiscal policy. This study leverages a large-scale natural experiment in India, the 2017 Goods-Service-Tax (GST) Reform, to quantify its impact on suppliers' pricing strategy and consumer...

To incentivize households to increase private savings, the Indian government implemented in July 2014 a new tax-subsidized saving policy that largely incentivizes homeowners by allowing them to exempt an additional 50,000 INR ($833) of the mortgage principal and interest payments from taxable...

Cybersecurity breaches pose a substantial privacy concern in the digital era. We investigate how customers respond to privacy leakage in multiple unexpected data breaches. Difference-in-differences estimates show that digital payments declined by 4.6% ~ 7.5% relative to cash payments immediately...

We utilize monthly individual-level financial data and item-level supermarket sales data to study how consumption responds to one of the costliest natural disasters in India. We find that consumption dropped by 11% during the disaster, 65% of which was recovered after the disaster. On average,...

Using a novel scanner data and difference-in-difference strategy, we assess how consumers respond to a large-scale tax reform in India that introduces exogenous variations in tax rate changes at the product level. We show evidence of a strong and persistent spending response to tax rate changes....

This paper exploits a natural experiment in India – Inflation Targeting to study how changes in inflation expectations influence households’ consumption, savings, and investments in risky assets. Using regional heterogeneity in inflation expectations by city and city-age-gender bins due to...