Mostly Economics

Mark Egan, Ali Hortaçsu, Nathan Kaplan, Adi Sunderam and Vincent Yao in this HBS Working paper write about banks need for sleepy customers. We examine the implications of sleepy deposits and their impact on competition, bank value, and financial stability in the US banking sector. We first document the shopping behavior of depositors using novel […]

Paul R. Gregory in this 2024 article on how Putin’s methods are similar to those deployed by Stalin: Vladimir Putin has created a vast climate of fear that extends beyond Russia and the Russian diaspora. As such, it effectively muzzles anti-Putin sentiment around the world. How this climate of fear works, and its differences from […]

Sam Hempel, JP Perez-Sangimino, and Jessie Jiaxu Wang in this Fed article: The expansion of stablecoins has moved digital payment tokens from the periphery of financial markets to the center of policy discussions. With a global market capitalization in the mid-hundreds of billions of dollars and annual settlement volumes in the trillions as of 2025, […]

Tyler Cowen on Jevons: In the 1860s Jevons built a Logical Abacus, sometimes called a logical piano, a kind of early computer that could perform (some kinds of) logical operations faster than humans could. It is held in the Museum of the History of Science at Oxford University, and you can think of its structure […]

RBI DG Poonam Gupta reviews India’s inflation targeting framework: It is a pleasure for me to be here at NCAER to speak on India’s current monetary policy framework. My remarks focus on how the existing framework has evolved over the past decade, where it stands today, and the issues that may shape its next iteration […]

Divide and rule has been a tried and tested strategy for empires and modern politics.  In order to rule for a long time, it is really important to keep the propaganda on us versus them for as long as possible. Nicola Gennaioli, Frederik Schwerter and Guido Tabellini research on how politicians and compliant media polarise […]

Harris Dellas and George S. Tavlas in the Journal of Economic Perspectives discuss history of ideas in great dollar shortage debate: The dollar shortage debate—Paul Samuelson called it “the big open question of our time”—dominated international macroeconomics in the 15 years following the end of World War II. There were two main views regarding its […]

Authoritarian leaders dislike statistical systems. One of the first institutions/people they fire is statisticians. Trump did the same. Nicholas Bloom, Erica L. Groshen, Duncan Hobbs & Michael R. Strain on importance of a reliable and robust statistical system: On August 1, 2025, President Trump fired the head of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and claimed that the […]

Prof Paul Ginsberg of University of Southern California in the recent Journal of Economic Perspectives:   This essay, commissioned to serve as an introduction to the JEP symposium on current competition in health care, provides a historical perspective on the role of both competition and regulation in the financing and delivery of health services since the implementation of […]

A Teacher Writes to Students Series (68): Cooperative Individualism Annavajhula J C Bose, PhD Former Professor, Department of Economics, SRCC, DU   The Coffee-Klatch-with-Robert-Reich videos can spook you out of your stupor as regards what do we do now with Trumpist academics and think tank politics. Likewise, if you dig up the history of economic […]

Johan Norberg of Cato Institute in Washington Post: After 16 years as a laboratory for post-liberal nationalism, the result in Hungary is clear: Sweeping aside institutional constraints on government in pursuit of grand visions of the common good unshackles the smallest, most sordid ambitions of rent-seeking and corruption. As the scriptures Orban is so fond of […]

Sebastian Edwards in this NBER paper: This paper examines Cybersyn — Chile’s cybernetic coordination system under Salvador Allende — during the October 1972 national truckers’ strike, which cut aggregate industrial output by roughly 9 percent. Using monthly data for twenty sectors and a calibrated CES–Leontief model, I construct sector-specific counterfactuals for the trucking shock. The […]

My new piece in Moneycontrol reflecting on how Gulf War 1991 posed challenges to India’s economy and led to significant policy shifts.  What will the Gulf War 2026 do to India’s economy and policy?  

This paper examines the impact of cultural diversity on innovation. Focusing on the United States from 1850 to 1940, we develop a novel surname-based measure of cultural diversity and combine this with patent data. Leveraging quasi-random variation in counties’ surname compositions driven by historical immigration, we find that rising diversity increased both the quantity and the quality of innov…

In July 1926, Royal Commisison on Currency and Finance under the chair Edward Hilton Young submitted its report. The Hilton Young Commission constituted to study the problems of currency and exchange rate became famous for its recommendation to establish a central bank in India. Eight years later the Reserve Bank of India Act (1934) was passed and in 1935 RBI came into being. My piece in Financia…

A Teacher Writes to Students Series (66): Queer Hallucinations Annavajhula J C Bose, PhD Former Professor, Department of Economics, SRCC, DU Assume that just after giving exams or during intermittent semester breaks, you notice a psychic pattern with you of having a series of hypnagogic hallucinations –harmless hallucinations which are neither a symptom of mental illness nor weed-consumption-indu…

Alexander Plekhanov, Koczan Zsoka and Victoria Marino of European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) in this research paper look at moving goalposts of industrial policy: This paper relies on a novel dataset of more than 31,000 industrial policies in 150 economies over the period 2009-2022 to codify and examine the stated objectives of these policies and their characteristics. We find…

Mike Kaiman and Guillaume Vandenbroucke write a short note on impact of industrial revolution: An economist, an inventor, and an entrepreneur walk into a town… While that sounds like the intro to a somewhat familiar joke, it is the beginning of one of the most important stories in history, which can teach valuable lessons about some basic economic concepts: the impact of economic growth, marginal…

Sujoy Chakravarty of JNU writes a short history of behavioral economics on IdeasforIndia platform: Daniel Kahneman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002, “for having integrated insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgement and decision-making under uncertainty.” On his birth anniversary, Chakravarty presents a brief account of Kahnema…

Global imbalances was a hot topic of research before 2008 crisis. Global imbalances were also central to the Bretton Woods agreement. Global imbalances have made another comeback. There are two recent research on global imbalances. As part of the French Presidency of the G7, a distinguished panel of economists including Chong-En Bai, Gita Gopinath, London Business School’s Hélène Rey, and Axel We…