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Showing all content in India
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Data: Third-party environmental auditing
In many regulated markets, private, third-party auditors are chosen and paid by the firms that they audit, potentially creating a conflict of interest. This article reports on a two-year field experiment in the Indian state of Gujarat that sought to curb such a conflict by altering the market structure for environmental audits of industrial plants to incentivize accurate...
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Data: What do Indian CEOs do? Time Use of Indian Top Executives: Determinants and Implications for Growth
We present evidence on the labor supply of CEOs, and on whether family and professional CEOs di↵er on this dimension. We do so through a new survey instrument that allows us to codify CEOs’ diaries in a detailed and comparable fashion, and to build a bottom-up measure of CEO labor supply. The comparison of 1,114 family and professional CEOs reveals that family CEOs work...
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Data: Management practices in retail, education and healthcare sectors in India
This paper presents the first in-depth descriptive look at the state of management practices in India. Using a unique dataset measuring the quality of management practices across countries and sectors, we find a consistent pattern of poor management practices in India in comparison to higher income countries across all the sectors studied: manufacturing, retail, education...
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Data: Long Run-Effects of Repayment Flexibility in Microfinance: Evidence from India
Financiers across the world structure debt contracts to limit the risk of entrepreneurial lending. But debt structures that reduce risk may inhibit enterprise growth, especially among the poor. Using a field experiment we quantify the short- and long-run tradeo↵s associated with the classic microfinance debt contract. We contrast the classic contract which requires that...
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Data: Potato Traders in West Bengal: A Survey of Contractual Relations and Market Structure
Our study consists of a pilot survey of a random sub-set of phorias (middlemen) and larger traders who operate in 72 villages of West Medinipur and Hugli districts and their corresponding potato markets. Our goal is to understand the nature of contractual relations between farmers and phorias on the one hand, and between phorias and wholesale traders that they sell to on...
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Data: Household Finance in India
We employ loan-level data on over a million loans disbursed in India between 1995 and 2010 to understand how fast-changing regulation impacted mortgage lending and risk. Our paper uses changes in regulatory treatment discontinuities associated with loan size and leverage to detect regulation-induced loan delinquencies. We also find that an acceleration in the classification...
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Data: Sugar mills: Ownership, productivity and crop choice
An old theoretical and empirical literature has struggled with how ownership structure affects economic outcomes. We seek to answer this question by examining the effect that different ownership structures have on the outcomes of sugarcane farmers in India. The econometric strategy exploits the zoning system - whereby farmers living within a zone are forced to sell sugar to...
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Data: The impact of electronic procurement of public works contracts in Indonesia and India
Poorly functioning, and often corrupt, public procurement procedures are widely faulted for the low quality of infrastructure provision in developing countries. Can electronic procurement (e-procurement), which reduces both the cost of acquiring tender information and personal interaction between bidders and procurement ocials, ameliorate these problems? In this paper we...
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Case Study: Firms
Increasing women’s participation in the workforce
Our research indicates that access to education, finance, and transportation can help increase women's independence and participation in the labour force.
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Blog post
Improving land security through community-based organisations
Researchers and policymakers agree that secure land rights constitute a vital pillar for sustained livelihood improvements among marginalized populations, but existing solutions have been primarily top-down in orientation. Can community-based organisations help to improve land security from the ground up? Bihar state law guarantees each rural household the right to hold...