13 February 2020: The "My Name is Khan" Effect: Unexpected Celebrity Destigmatization and Pharmaceutical Demand Spillovers

Anindya S. Chakrabarti
Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad

Organised by
The Centre for Development Economics and Department of Economics, Delhi School of Economics

Abstract:
Can unexpected celebrity destigmatization cause demand spillovers in pharmaceutical markets? We provide causal evidence on this question using the econometric context of the release of a highly successful Bollywood movie, My Name is Khan (MNIK) in India whose protagonist Rizwan Khan had Aspergers Syndrome (AS). Using a difference in differences setting, we leverage the timing of release of MNIK in India and examine its impact on drugs consumed in India for autism spectrum disorders (ASD) of which AS is a subset. In our baseline estimations, our treated group were medicines that were atypical antipsychotics and our control group were typical antipsychotics. Controlling for all else in the average region, the growth rate of milligrams sold of atypical antipsychotic molecules on an average increased by atleast 2.8 percent after the release of MNIK compared to growth rate in sales of the average typical antipsychotic molecule in the market. These results are robust across alternative specifications that control for unobserved heterogeneity at the molecule-region or region-time level, also while employing a synthetic control strategy, an alternative control group and sharpened sample windows. Associatedly relative to the control markets, we also observe a variety expansion in products in our treated markets by more than 20 percent, spike in absolute number of physician prescriptions and expansion of product varieties being prescribed in the market by clinicians. Our findings contribute to prior work examining the impact of celebrity engagement and endorsement through educational entertainment and media technologies. We conclude discussing managerial and policy implications of our results.

Date: February 13, 2020
Time: 03:05 P.M.

Venue:
New Seminar Room no. 116, First Floor
Department of Economics,
Delhi School of Economics,
New Delhi-110007(INDIA)

Location:

24 January 2020: Intergenerational Mobility in India: Estimates from New Methods and Administrative Data

Sam Asher
Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies

Organised by
The Centre for Development Economics and Department of Economics, Delhi School of Economics

Abstract:
Estimating intergenerational mobility in developing countries is difficult because matched parent-child income records are rarely available and education is measured very coarsely. In particular, there are no established methods for comparing educational mobility for subsamples of the population when the education distribution is changing over time. We resolve these problems using new methods in partial identification and new administrative data, and study intergenerational mobility across groups and across space in India. Intergenerational mobility for the population as a whole has remained constant since liberalization, but cross-group changes have been substantial. Rising mobility among historically marginalized Scheduled Castes is almost exactly offset by declining intergenerational mobility among Muslims, a comparably sized group that has few constitutional protections. These findings contest the conventional wisdom that marginalized groups in India have been catching up on average. We also explore heterogeneity across space, generating the first high-resolution geographic measures of intergenerational mobility across India, with results across 5600 rural subdistricts and 2300 cities and towns. On average, children are most successful at exiting the bottom of the distribution in places that are southern, urban, or have higher average education levels.

Date: January 24, 2020
Time: 03:05 P.M.

Venue:
New Seminar Room no. 116, First Floor
Department of Economics,
Delhi School of Economics,
New Delhi-110007(INDIA)

Location:

20 January 2020: Can Hope Elevate Microfinance? Evidence from Oaxaca, Mexico

Travis J Lybbert
University of California, Davis

Organised by
The Centre for Development Economics and Department of Economics, Delhi School of Economics

Abstract:
Recent evidence suggests that the average effects of microfinance on borrowers is more modest than previously claimed. We carry out an experiment to test whether an intervention designed to increase aspirational hope among borrowers can elevate microfinance impacts. In collaboration with a microfinance lender in Mexico, we produced a documentary featuring successful borrowers within the organization and designed and implemented a hope curriculum rooted in positive psychology (Snyder, 1994), which conceptualizes hope as aspirations, agency, and pathways. Bank officers incorporated this curriculum into their regular weekly meetings with a randomly treated half of 52 women’s savings and credit groups with 780 women over the course of one year. We find that the intervention modestly increased indices measuring both aspirational hope and microenterprise performance over this time period. The intervention significantly increased employment and plans to hire new employees. Increases in microenterprise sales and profits were positive but statistically insignificant.

Date: January 20, 2020
Time: 03:05 P.M.

Venue:
New Seminar Room no. 116, First Floor
Department of Economics,
Delhi School of Economics,
New Delhi-110007(INDIA)

Location:

5 December 2019: The Impact of Monetary Policy in a Dual Economy

Varsha S. Kulkarni
Harvard University

Organised by
The Centre for Development Economics and Department of Economics, Delhi School of Economics

Abstract:
There is a line of research in macroeconomics that believes that if the expectations are rational then the activist monetary policies would do little to raise the output and instead may increase or even destabilize the inflation. In accordance with the New Keynesian Philips Curve (NKPC), when the traders are able to anticipate changes in policies, they’re able to make accurate estimations of inflation and hence the output would remain mostly unchanged (at full employment). This absence of an appreciable long-run tradeoff between inflation and output also strengthens the case for inflation targeting. However, in practice both the long-run neutrality of money and unchanging output have been increasingly questioned. The impact of policies is known to be substantial for increasing output. Further, one of the main drawbacks of NKPC is identified as not being able to explain the widely prevalent inflation persistence. In keeping with all this, a hybrid expectations model is often suggested as an improvement, one which would incorporate both backward-looking and forward-looking inflation components. While researchers are constantly trying to study different sources of market imperfections to explain the findings, there is a lot of variation across countries in terms of the behavior of traders and the formation of expectations. It is of interest to see how the policies like inflation targeting would unfold in the midst of uncertainties and aggregate demand shocks experienced commonly by the developing economies. We explore one such scenario for an economy like India which functions dually between the well-regulated and informed formal sector on the one hand and the relatively unregulated and uninformed informal sector on the other. We identify the informal sector as an important source of imperfection and expectation heterogeneity. We study the heterogeneous expectations in terms of their reactions to inflation target both theoretically and empirically. In this paper, the heterogeneity in expectations together with the response to an inflation target gives rise to a non-constant velocity and, therefore, aggregate demand, even when money supply is fixed. We find that the presence of informal sector makes it difficult to control the fluctuations in output and therefore poses a challenge to effective policy making. We study empirically the impact of demonetization shock. Finally, the paper incorporates this heterogeneity as two different kinds of firms reacting differently to new information or policies. It derives a variant of the sticky information Phillips curve developed earlier. In this talk, I will present the computational, empirical as well as theoretical results and discuss the implications.

Date: December 5, 2019
Time: 03:05 P.M.

Venue:
Amex Room (Second Floor)
Department of Economics,
Delhi School of Economics,
New Delhi-110007(INDIA)

Location:

8 November 2019: TRIPS, Patents, and Drug Prices in India

Bhaven Sampat
Columbia University and NBER

Organised by
The Centre for Development Economics and Department of Economics, Delhi School of Economics

Abstract:
This paper examines the effects of product patents on drug prices and competition in India. Several previous analyses have found only negligible effects of patents on prices and competition in the post-TRIPS era, citing inadequate implementation and unique aspects of Indian Patent Law such as Section 3(d) as potential explanations for these surprising findings. We argue that the limited impact thus far instead reflects another aspect of TRIPS implementation: the decision to not allow patents with pre-1995 priority dates. We demonstrate that the main patents on most drugs approved until very recently (and the majority of drugs covered by previous analyses) are pre-1995 priority. When we focus on drugs fully covered by the TRIPS regime - those whose primary (compound) patent has a post-1995 priority date — we find much larger effects of patents on prices and competition. We argue that these price/competition effects are what we should expect in the long-run steady state, once the long shadow of implementation fades. We discuss implications for prices, access, and innovation in India and globally, and for empirical research on the globalization of patent protection.

Date: November 8, 2019
Time: 03:05 P.M.

Venue:
Amex Room (Second Floor)
Department of Economics,
Delhi School of Economics,
New Delhi-110007(INDIA)

Location:

14 October 2019: Impact of Demographic Dynamics on Migration

François Héran
National Institute for Demographic Research and National Institute of Statistics, France

Organised by
The Centre for Development Economics and Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics

Abstract:
It is a widespread view, including among researchers to believe that the primary motor of international migration is a system of communicating vessels: the least developed countries would migrate mechanically to the most developed, the overpopulated countries to the least dense, the most fertile to the less fertile, and so on. The notion of "climate migrations" seems to add a new example to this series.

Several metaphors are widely used to express this traditional "gravity model" of international migration. Some have a scholarly flavour, such as the "natural" circulation of migrants from areas of "high demographic pressures" to "low pressure" areas. Others are more popular and feed public debate (like the "magnet effect"), mingling with classical rhetorical figures: the "slippery slope" argument, the "perverse effect" arguments, etc.

In order to refute this mechanical vision of migration flows, we shall analyse the "Bilateral Migration Database" (IMF, IOM, OECD) which now offers a global view of migration systems and facilitates the integration of a wide spectrum of factors. The analysis will be supported by examples from Eastern Europe, the Indian Subcontinent, and sub-Saharan Africa. It will also be suggested that quantitative analyses of migration systems should be accompanied by a critical analysis of the rhetorical systems of argumentation.

Date: October 14, 2019
Time: 03:05 P.M.

Venue:
Amex Room (Second Floor)
Department of Economics,
Delhi School of Economics,
New Delhi-110007(INDIA)

Location:

19 September 2019: General Equilibrium Impacts in Imperfect Agricultural Markets: Evidence from the Tanzanian Cotton Industry

Anubhab Gupta
University of California, Davis

Abstract:
This paper evaluates the general equilibrium effects of agricultural market structures by examining how market power of downstream intermediaries shape the economy-wide impacts of technological improvements in agriculture. Economic impact evaluations in developing countries usually do not include spillovers, and they do not explicitly consider market power. Using industry and original survey data from the Western Cotton Growing Area of Tanzania, I construct an index of oligopsony power of cotton ginners in their cotton purchase, and non-parametrically estimate the index as 0.28. A parametrized general equilibrium model of a cotton producing local economy using micro-household data shows that a technological improvement in cotton production has significant spillover benefits for households not directly involved in cotton production. Intermediary market power of downstream cotton ginners not only mitigates the direct benefits for poor cotton-producing households but also significantly diminishes the indirect benefits for non-cotton-producing households. The direct income increases of technology improvement for the cotton producers are reduced by 2.2 to 5.6 percentage points, and the indirect income increases for the non-cotton producing households are reduced by 0.5 to 0.8 percentage points. A realistic analysis of policies aimed at raising welfare in rural economies must consider effects of market power. Taking agricultural market structure into account opens up new policy considerations and opportunities, including the benefits of laws limiting or proscribing anticompetitive behavior to prevent formation of mergers and coalitions downstream from farms.

Date: September 19, 2019
Time: 03:05 P.M.

Venue:
Amex Room (Second Floor)
Department of Economics,
Delhi School of Economics,
New Delhi-110007(INDIA)

Location:

1 August 2019: Drought Relief in India

Lisa Tarquinio
Boston University

Abstract:
To analyze the (mis)allocation of drought relief, I have constructed a panel dataset of rainfall in the states of Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and Karnataka for 2008 to 2018 at the assembly constituency (AC) level, the political unit at which state-level members of parliament (MLAs) are elected. I then match the rainfall data to AC-level election data and lists of official drought declarations at the mandal/taluk level. I use a fixed-effects panel regression analysis, where the empirical specifications are derived from a simple model in which the MLA seeks to be re-elected and drought declarations increase voter preferences for the MLA. First, I have established that the formula-based resource program does, to a degree, function as designed; mainly, I find that areas that meet the necessary rainfall deviation cutoff are more likely to be declared as drought affected. However, I also show that the likelihood of a drought declaration is affected by constituency-level political variables. On average, official drought declarations are more likely to occur in constituencies where the MLA is a member of the ruling party (or coalition) or where voter turnout in the last election was higher. I also find that constituencies in which the MLA won the last election by a smaller margin are more likely to receive a drought declaration if they also meet the rainfall deviation cutoff. In whole, this suggests that in spite of national and state guidelines proscribing a formula-based approach to drought relief, there does appear to be local political influence over the allocation of relief.

Date: August 1, 2019
Time: 03:00 P.M.

Venue:
Seminar Room (First Floor)
Department of Economics,
Delhi School of Economics,
New Delhi-110007(INDIA)

Location:

14 January 2019: Improving Monetary Transmission Through the Banking Channel - The Case for External Benchmarks in Bank Loans

Viral Acharya
Reserve Bank of India

Date: January 14, 2019
Time: 03:00 P.M.

Venue:
Swami Vivekananda Hall
Department of Economics,
Delhi School of Economics,
New Delhi-110007(INDIA)

Location:

26 April 2018: Jobs for Justice(s): Corruption in the Supreme Court of India

Madhav S. Aney
Singapore Management University

Abstract:
We investigate whether judges respond to pandering incentives by ruling in favour of the government in the hope of receiving jobs after retiring from the Court. We construct a dataset of all Supreme Court of India cases involving the government from 1999 till 2014, with an indicator for whether the decision was in its favour or not. We find that pandering incentives have a causal e↵ect on judicial decision-making, where we define pandering incentives as being jointly determined by 1) the salience of the case (exogenously determined by a system of random allocation of cases) and 2) whether the judge retires with enough time left in a government’s term to be rewarded with a prestigious job (since the date of retirement is exogenously determined by law to be their 65th birthday). We also find that authoring judgements in favour of the government is positively associated with the likelihood of being appointed to a prestigious post-Supreme Court job. These findings suggest the presence of corruption in the form of government influence over judicial decisions that seriously undermines judicial independence.

Date: April 26, 2018
Time: 03:00 P.M.

Venue:
Seminar Room (First Floor) 
Department of Economics,
Delhi School of Economics,
New Delhi-110007(INDIA)

Location:

25 July 2017: The Risk Premium on Balance Sheet Capacity

Anusar Farooqui
Indian Institute of Management, Udaipur

Abstract:
We show that exposure to shocks to the balance sheet capacity of US securities broker-dealers carries a significant risk premium. We construct a novel measure of dealer risk appetite and show that it is priced in the cross-section of expected stock excess returns; even after controlling for benchmark risk factors (MKT, SMB, HML, RMW, CMA, MOM and VOL). We document that risk appetite, median book-to-market ratio, the term spread and the difference in market and average excess returns are, independently and jointly, statistically significant predictors of future market excess returns. Armed with these four return-forecasting factors, we estimate dynamic pricing models with constant betas and time-varying prices of risk. We document significant time-variation in the intermediary risk premium and show that it has a natural macro-financial interpretation. In particular, we show that, unlike the premiums on benchmark factors, it is highly procyclical and gets extraordinarily compressed during periods of stock market exuberance such as that of the late-1990s. We find significant macroeconomic information embedded in the intermediary risk premium. Specifically, we show that the intermediary risk premium is both a significant contemporaneous correlate and a significant predictor of quarterly innovations in the US growth rate. We further show that the time-varying intermediary risk premium dwarfs the premiums on benchmark factors. Finally, we construct a factor mimicking portfolio for risk appetite and show that it sports a Sharpe ratio at least twice as large as benchmark factor portfolios.

Date: July 25, 2017
Time: 03:00 P.M.

Venue:
Seminar Room (First Floor) 
Department of Economics,
Delhi School of Economics,
New Delhi-110007(INDIA)

Location:

2 March 2017: The Transmission of Monetary Policy Within Banks: Evidence from India​

Prachi Mishra
Reserve Bank of India

Date: March 2, 2017
Time: 03:00 P.M.

Venue:
Seminar Room (First Floor) 
Department of Economics,
Delhi School of Economics,
New Delhi-110007(INDIA)

Location:

19 January 2017: Barking Up the Wrong Tree: Retrospective Voting, Natural Disasters, and Electoral Backlash

Johannes Urplelainen
Columbia University

Abstract:
While scholarship on “retrospective voting” has found that incumbent politicians can be punished for a range of events outside their control, such as natural disasters, the literature does not consider the ability of politicians to respond to disasters and the impact of this response on voters. We argue that retrospective voters punish only opposition incumbents (candidates in office but not aligned with the government leader), who have limited access to government resources for relief, for natural disasters. We use monthly data on precipitation and evaporation to capture droughts and floods in India’s four thousand State Assembly electoral constituencies over the years 1977-2007. Consistent with our hypothesis, we find that Members of State Assembly from the party of the Prime or Chief Minister do not face an electoral backlash under bad weather conditions during the summer harvest season, whereas opposition politicians face major losses. Using household survey data, we next demonstrate that this punishment is meted by people who do not benefit from government relief. These results not only refine theories of retrospective voting by considering the role of political alignment, but also raise troubling questions about democratic politics in India and other developing countries.

Date: January 19, 2017
Time: 03:00 P.M.

Venue:
Seminar Room (First Floor) 
Department of Economics,
Delhi School of Economics,
New Delhi-110007(INDIA)

Location:

13 December 2016: Revisiting Decoupling and Recoupling of BRIC Stock Markets with U.S. and Eurozone

Divya Tuteja
Delhi School of Economics

Abstract:
It has been well-documented in the literature that recent crises have led to large fluctuations in financial markets around the world. In this background, the objective of this paper is to assess decoupling vs recoupling of BRIC stock markets with the U.S. and Eurozone stock markets in the post 2000 period. We first, estimate the time-varying conditional correlation of the BRIC stock markets with the U.S. and Eurozone stock markets using a DCC-GARCH model. Thereafter, we identify regimes in the correlations using the Bai and Perron (2003) algorithm for endogenous selection of break dates. We study the behaviour of the conditional correlations during various identified phases with emphasis on the recent crises in the West. Finally, we test for a change in causal links among the markets across the regimes.

Date: December 13, 2016
Time: 11:30 P.M.

Venue:
Seminar Room No. 2
Indian Statistical Institute Delhi Centre,
7, S. J. S. Sansanwal Marg,
New Delhi-110016 (INDIA)

Location:

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10 November 2016: Biofortification

Howarth Bouis
International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)

Date: November 10, 2016
Time: 03:00 P.M.

Venue:
AMEX Room (Second Floor) 
Department of Economics,
Delhi School of Economics,
New Delhi-110007(INDIA)

Location:

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22nd September 2016: Misled and Mis-sold: Financial misbehaviour in retail banks?

Renuka Sane
ISI, New Delhi

Abstract:
We use an audit methodology where auditors ask for tax saving instruments from banks and document the disclosures made on product features at the time of sale. In private sector banks with high sales incentives, the high commission product is recommended. In public sector banks, where there are deposit mobilisation targets, fixed deposits are recommended. Banks rarely make voluntary disclosures on product features. When specifically requested, information provided is inaccurate or incomplete. Our results demonstrate the challenges of mandating disclosures when buyers have little understanding of the relevance of product characteristics, and distributors are themselves ignorant or influenced by incentives.

Date: September 22, 2016
Time: 03:00 P.M.

Venue:
Seminar Room (First Floor)
Department of Economics,
Delhi School of Economics,
New Delhi-110007(INDIA)

Location:

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1st September 2016: An Application (or Two) of the Synthetic Control Method (SCM) in Policy Evaluation

Devesh Roy
IFPRI, New Delhi

Abstract:
We estimate the impact of the Hartz Reforms, the most prominent labor reforms in Germany since the Second World War, on the German labor market. We adopt a cross-country program evaluation approach where, employing Synthetic Control Method (SCM) for comparative case studies, we utilize the characteristics of OECD countries to construct a counterfactual for Germany. We find that while the reforms did not impact the overall unemployment rates they did increase temporary employment. We trace this result to elevated labor force participation with accompanying composition effect that channeled the increased number of participants to temporary employment.

SCM is tailor made for situations where there is one – or a handful of – treated units compared against a large number of control units. SCM also has specific advantages when the heterogeneities across comparison units are substantive and important.

We have used SCM in a number of policy evaluation cases that fits this description. We studied changes in sources of insurance coverage due to the 2006 Massachusetts health reform, which is the precursor to the Affordable Health Care reform, or popularly known as Obamacare.

Exploring the variation among U.S. states we have looked into the possible causes of income inequality: in one paper we examined if the Right-to-work Laws that passed in four U.S. states over the last five decades contributed to the rising inequality. In another paper, a work-in-progress, we test the impact of minimum wage hike on inequality.

We have employed SCM on issues of international trade and development. We have investigated the impact of NAFTA on regional CO2 emissions, impacts of the TRIPS agreement on the pharmaceutical industry in India – international trade, in particular.  We are also studying the impact of grid separation – a novel electricity distribution policy – in Gujarat, India, on outcomes related to agriculture and leakages in distribution.

Date: September 1, 2015
Time: 03:00 P.M.

Venue:
Seminar Room (First Floor)
Department of Economics,
Delhi School of Economics,
New Delhi-110007(INDIA)

Location:

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19 August 2015: Why Economists Need to Take an Interest in Patent Policy

Hazel Moir
Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University

Abstract:
Where large lumpy investments are combined with a relatively fast ability to imitate an invention, the market for invention may fail and useful new inventions will not attract the requisite investment. This perspective on the rationale for patents particularly characterises the pharmaceutical industry.

Efficient and effective patent policy is that which most closely approximates two conditions:

(i) patents are granted only for inventions which would not otherwise occur; and
(ii) patents are granted only where the social benefits (private plus spillover benefits) exceed the social cost of the monopoly grant.

Most economists pay little attention to the patent system, and when they do they often repeat the mantra that “patents are essential to induce innovation”.

This mantra is based on two critical assumptions – that copying knowledge developed by someone else is costless, and that copying is so fast that there is no natural first mover monopoly period. Substantial evidence exists to indicate that both presumptions are false.

A further assumption that economists tend to make about patent systems is that one cannot get a patent unless there is some inventiveness. Again the evidence demonstrates that this assumption is false. Decades of legal doctrine have changed the criteria for patent grant, such that now only a scintilla of inventiveness is required. Such a low requirement means that the second condition for efficient patent policy is breached. Most granted patents incorporate little if any new knowledge and so provide no spillover benefits. 

Date: August 19, 2015
Time: 03:00 P.M.

Venue:
Seminar Room (First Floor)
Department of Economics,
Delhi School of Economics,
New Delhi-110007(INDIA)

Location:

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2 March 2015: New Issues at the Interface of Competition (Antitrust) Policy and Intellectual Property: The Internet, Patents, and On-line Sales

D. Daniel Sokol
University of Florida, Levin College of Law

Date: March 2, 2015
Time: 03:00 P.M.

Venue:
AMEX Room (Second Floor)
Department of Economics,
Delhi School of Economics,
New Delhi-110007(INDIA)

Location:

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29 January 2015: India as a creditor: sterling balances, 1940-1956

Marcelo Abreu
Catholic Pontifical University of Rio de Janeiro

Abstract:
The British war effort during World War II depended on Lend Lease provided by the United States and the accumulation of sterling balances by neutrals and the Empire. Of the total sterling balances of £3,355 million outstanding in mid-1945 about 40% had been accumulated by India.

The paper seeks to evaluate comprehensively the costs incurred by India in the process of reducing the balances from independence until 1953 when releases of remaining balances were agreed within the scope of the Colombo Plan. The sources of accumulation of balances between 1939 and 1946 are examined. The use of the balances to repatriate Indian sterling debt until 1943 is described. The issue of a possible British “counterclaim” entailing a partial cancellation of Indian balances is analyzed. The complex Anglo-Indian sterling balance negotiations, which dragged between 1947 and 1953, are considered, including the disposal of balances through releases, transfer of assets to Pakistan resulting from the partition, settlement of pensions, purchase of military stores and British gold sales. The possible contribution of British divestment to reduce outstanding Indian sterling balances is assessed. The link between sterling balances accumulation and war time inflation in India, especially in 1942-43, and the claims of British “repudiationists” on the rise of prices affecting British military procurement in Indian are considered. The core of the paper centers on the evaluation of costs involved in the adoption of the measures agreed on the remuneration and disposal of Indian sterling balances. This will include comparisons with the cases of other sterling balance holders such as Portugal, Brazil and Argentina.

Date: January 29, 2015
Time: 03:00 P.M.

Venue:
Seminar Room (First Floor)
Department of Economics,
Delhi School of Economics,
New Delhi-110007(INDIA)

Location:

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