We exploit a leading FinTech peer-to-peer lending platform paired with an automated robo-advising lending tool to test for and quantify the effects of cultural biases in large-stake risky choices for which the scope for statistical discrimination is minimal. Comparing the choices lenders make...

Do safety nets affect investment? If so, how? Combining a natural experiment that gives guaranteed income to landowning farmers in India with transaction-level bank data and loan-level credit bureau data, we evaluate the impact of unconditional and perpetual guaranteed income on small farmer...

We study exposure to pollution information and investment portfolio allocations, exploiting the rollout of air quality monitoring stations in India. Using a triple-differences framework, we show that retail investors' investments in "brown" stocks are negatively related to local air pollution...

Interest in central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) has been burgeoning with 134 countries now exploring its implementation. In December 2022, India started its CBDC pilot program to continue its transition towards a digitized payments economy. This paper presents the first empirical analysis...

Should political institutions concentrate power in more hands or a single hand? This paper provides microeconomic evidence on the relationship between multiple elected representatives and economic growth. We find that increasing the number of politicians governing an area leads to greater firm...

This study provides a new perspective on the rise of FinTech lending by uncovering an informational synergy with cashless payments. Theoretically, FinTech lenders screen borrowers more efficiently when borrowers use cashless payments that produce transferable and verifiable information. In turn,...

The manager of an Indian business group (BG) fund can have access to private information on its own BG firms and their industries. However, since the fund belongs to a BG, the fund manager may also have incentives to undertake investments that benefit the BG firm managers and not its fund...

Product offerings in many consumer packaged goods (CPG) categories come in a variety of complex branding structures built around some discernable branding hierarchy. We develop a nonparametric statistical method in the context of a market response model to estimate the residual equity of each...

We argue that voters' political support for the ruling party shapes the transmission of fiscal policy measures that require households' action, especially when political polarization is high. We find that the take-up rates of a large-scale Indian loan-guarantee program (Mudra loans) are higher...