Mostly Economics

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…

I investigate the ideological profile of France’s 100 bestselling economics books listed by FNAC (a leading French bookseller) at the end of 2024. Despite France’s persistent economic stagnation, public discourse remains firmly committed to state-led economic governance, with little exposure to liberal or market-oriented alternatives. T he article introduces a typology for classifying economic be…

Philip Mirowski picks his 5 best books on Hayek: Friedrich Hayek was not a great formal economist, but he has been hugely influential politically and in the evolution of modern microeconomics, perhaps in spite of himself, argues Philip Mirowski, a historian and philosopher of economic thought. He talks us through books to better understand the Austrian émigré who ended up in the United States as …

Francesco Bianchi, Marco Del Negro, Giorgio Primiceri and Frank Schorfheide pay tribute to Prof Christopher Sims: Chris Sims, who passed away in March 2026, reshaped modern macroeconomics by insisting that theory and data speak together. A pioneer of vector autoregressions, Bayesian methods, and policy relevant modelling, he transformed how scholars and practitioners analyse economic dynamics and…

A Teacher Writes to Students Series (65): Remembering Philip Klein Annavajhula J C Bose, PhD Former Professor, Department of Economics, SRCC, DU “Economics is 100% Bullshit”. You might disagree or even be offended. But not  Paul Romer, Trevor Stark, Tony Annet and many, many other scholars.  I consider Philip Klein here as one of them […]

Batuhan Koyuncu, Byeungchun Kwon, Marco Jacopo Lombardi, Fernando Perez-Cruz and Hyun Song Shin intrduce BISTRO – BIS Time-series Regression Oracle. It is like a ChatGPT for forecasting macro time series: Predictions of macroeconomic variables are a key input to economic policy, yet traditional econometric approaches have the limitation that the model needs to be tailored to the specific ta…

Robert Reich on 250th Anniversary of Adam Smith’s Revolutionary Text: Friends, Today I’m burdening you with a longer-than-usual post — one that’s not about Trump, or his war, or Jeffrey Epstein, or even American politics. It’s about something more powerful than any of these things: an idea. An idea that many people fundamentally misunderstand. Not only […]

Nifty 50 Index completed 30 years. SEBI chairperson Tuhin Kanta Pandey gave a speech on the occassion. It is a pleasure to join you today as we celebra te 30 years of the Nifty 50 Index. Occasions like this are not merely about marking  a number or a milestone. They offer us an opportunity to reflect […]

Gabriel Ahlfeldt, Nathaniel Baum-Snow and Remi Jedwab in this voxeu research: Land-use regulations, including height limits, affect housing affordability and urban productivity. This column analyses over 11,000 urban agglomerations and 300,000 tall buildings to explore the effect of height restrictions on welfare. Vertical growth enhances land efficiency, reduces commuting, and boosts worker welf…

As if there was not enough bad news around, one has seen really strange developments in HDFC Bank. On 18 March 2026, the Bank’s Chaiperson, Atanu Chakraborty suddenly resigned: I hereby tender my resignation from as Part- time Chairman and Independent Director on the Board of HDFC Bank, with effect from its Date of its […]

I just participated in a 3-day Programme at IIM Ahmedabad from 16-18 March 2026 on Strategic Legacy Management: Using History to Create Business Value (SLM). The next year’s programme dates are already out and it is from 17-19 March 2027. The SLM programme is one of its kind. The introduction on the website sums the […]