Research Interests:
  • Primary: International Trade, Innovation, Environment, and Development Economics
  • Secondary: Industrial Organization and Finance

Work in Progress: 
  • ​​Do Lenders also Respond to Import Competition? Evidence from Bank-Firm Loan Level Data (with S. K. Ritadhi) [pdf]
    • ​How do lenders respond to import competition? Using a novel bank-firm loan level database matched with balance sheet data, we study this question in the context of India following China’s accession to the WTO in 2001. We find strong evidence of endogenous financial constraints and heterogeneity in lender responses to higher import competition. Private banks connected to firms in high exposure sectors drop credit supply by around 25--57% with no effect for government-owned banks'. Drop in credit supply is overwhelmingly driven only by intensive margin. We also show that our results are not driven by other general equilibrium effects such as firm, industry, and geographical characteristics. Banks with a larger share of loans to firms in high exposure sectors suffer a drop in profitability and external borrowing thereby reducing their credit supply. The drop in credit supply also affects real outcomes of firms with economically meaningful implications in terms of sales, use of production factors (labour, capital, and raw materials), and stock of assets. To the best of our knowledge, ours is one of the first to show that shocks to the real economy can also have significant spillover effects to the financial sector.
  • Import Competition, Labour Regulations, and Firm Outsourcing (with D.  Mitra and A. Sundaram)
  • Chinese Import Competition and Prices: Evidence from India (with M. Henry and R. Singh)
  • Import Competition,  ​​Knowledge Access, and Innovation (with R. Ahsan)​​

Paper(s) Under Review:
  • Trade Reform , M&A Activity, and Family Firms (with H. Yang) Revise and Resubmit at IMF Economic Review
    • ​We estimate the effect of trade liberalization, especially the role of foreign or product market competition, on domestic M&As of the Indian manufacturing firms. We find that higher degree of product market competition, or a 10% drop in output tariffs reduces the probability of a domestic M&A by 0.45 or 45%. Our results show substantial heterogeneity when dividing firms by their ownership: family-owned and others. The response of the former is in stark contrast to the latter: for family firms, domestic M&A increases by 68--86% while non-family firms reduce their domestic M&A activities by 35--58%. And, affiliation to an upstream industry plays a critical role in explaining such differential behaviour. Lastly, we show that family firms which are M&A active register an increase in their output and sales. Our results highlight one important point, both from theoretical and empirical perspective, how a firm's ownership influences its reorganization while competing with external forces.
  • Bank Ownership and Firm Performance Revise and Resubmit at Economica 
    • Does a bank's ownership matter for a firm's performance (to which it is connected)? Especially, in the event of a crisis? I study this question through the effect of 2008-09 crisis on Indian manufacturing firms to provide evidence on a new channel that can matter significantly for a firm's performance - bank ownership. I find that firms connected to private (domestic and foreign) banks earn around 10% and 25% less from sales and exports, respectively during the crisis as compared to firms' having banking relationships with public-sector banks. This happened as private banks were differentially affected in terms of credit supply from the Central Bank and withdrawal of deposits. Firms connected to private banks also laid-off more workers, and imported less capital goods. Lastly, these effects are significant across the size distribution of the firms (except the smallest firms) and for firms producing intermediates.​​
  • Can a Trade Policy Change Increase Gender Equality? New Evidence from Chile (with U. Banerjee and L. Castro) Submitted
    • Do firms reorganize gender composition of their employment in response to a trade shock? Using novel data on gender composition of employment across several occupational groups for Chilean manufacturing firms for 1995-2007, a developing country with low gender equality, and utilizing the 1999 Chile-Mexico Free Trade Agreement (FTA) as the quasi-natural shock, we document the first evidence that the share of female white-collar workers increase by 3% for exporters (as opposed to non-exporters) after the trade agreement. This increase happens through a substitution effect from male to female high-skilled workers caused primarily due to higher use of technology and non-productive tasks by an exporter: technological adoption (both foreign and domestic), innovation, and publicity and promotional expenses. We also show that around 4% of the productivity increase due to the FTA can be attributed to the reduced gender-gap in white-collar employment. Lastly, this increase in female white-collar workers holds for (a) both ex-ante and new exporters, and (b) firms with both male and female owners. Overall, we show that trade can play an important role in addressing gender gap in employment.
  • Import Competition, Formalization, and the Role of Contract Labor (with R. Singh and V. Soundararajan) Submitted
    • ​Does higher import competition increase formalization and aggregate productivity? Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation from Chinese imports, we provide empirical causal evidence that higher imports increases the share of formal manufacturing enterprise employment in India. This formal share increase is both due to the rise in formal-enterprise employment driven by the high productivity firms, and a fall in informal-enterprise employment. The labor reallocation is enabled by the formal firms' hiring of contract workers, who do not carry stringent firing costs. Overall, Chinese import competition increased formal sector employment share by 3.7 percentage points, and aggregate labor productivity by 2.87\%, between 2000-2001 and 2005-2006.​
​
Publications: 
Journal Articles:
  • Cross-border Environmental Regulation and Firm Labor Demand (with A. Chakrabarti and C. Chatterjee)
    • Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Forthcoming 
  • Intellectual Property Regimes and Wage Inequality (with S. Bhattacharya and  C. Chatterjee)
    • ​Journal of Development Economics 154: 102709, 2022  [pdf]
  • Chinese Competition and Product Variety of Indian firms (with M. Henry) 
    • Journal of Comparative Economics 47 (2): 367-395, 2019 [pdf]
  • Input-trade Liberalization and the Demand for Managers: Evidence from India (with O. Raveh)
    • ​​Journal of International Economics 111: 159-176, 2018 [pdf]
  • The Great Trade Collapse and Indian Firms
    • ​​World Economy 41 (1): 100-125, 2018 [pdf]
  • Environmental Standards, Trade and Innovation: Evidence from a Natural Experiment
    • Environment and Development Economics 22 (4): 414-446, 2017 [pdf]
  • ​Does Environmental Regulation Indirectly Induce Upstream Innovation? New Evidence from India (with C. Chatterjee) 
    • Research Policy 46 (5): 939-955, 2017 [pdf]
      • Top three 2017 articles w/the most social media attention @ResearchPolicy  
  • Judicial Quality and Regional Firm Performance: The Case of Indian States 
    • Journal of Comparative Economics ​44 (4): 902-918, 2016 [pdf]
  • Does Openness Affect Inequality? A Case Study for India (with A. Barua) 
    • Review of Development Economics 14 (3): 447-465, 2010 [pdf]

Other Journal Articles:
  • Effect of Environmental Regulation on Firm Performance: Evidence from a Policy Experiment
    • Economic and Political Weekly 51 (24): 104-111, 2016 [pdf]
  • Standards or Hazards: Environmental Compliance and Market Access Concerns for India’s Marine and Agricultural Products
    • Asia Pacific Journal of Environmental Law 12 (1): 85-116, 2009 [pdf]
  • Environmental Regulations and Indian Leather Industry (with D. Chakraborty)
    • Economic and Political Weekly 42 (19): 1669-1672, 2007 [pdf]
      • ​Reprinted in N. Kumar and V. V. Ramani (eds.), Indian Industry and Environment: Policies and Practices, pp. 216-222, ICFAI University Press, Hyderabad, 2008
  • India's Exports in the post-WTO Phase: Some Exploratory Results and Future Concerns (with D. Chakraborty)
    • Foreign Trade Review 40 (1): 3-26, 2005 [pdf]

Chapters in Books:
  • Trade Reform, Managers, and Skill Intensity: Evidence from India [pdf]
    • in M. Bacchetta and M. Helble (eds.), Trade Adjustment in Asia: Past Experiences and Lessons Learned, pp. 229-275, 2019
  • Trade and Industrial Performance since the WTO Reforms: What Indian Evidences Suggest? (with A. Barua and D. Chakraborty) [pdf] 
    • in R. M. Stern and A. Barua (eds.), India and the WTO: Issues and Negotiating Strategies, pp. 121-144, 2010 
  • Environmental Service Negotiation and India: Priorities and Concerns (with O. De) [pdf]
    • in B. DebRoy et al. (eds.) the trade game: negotiation trends at WTO and concerns of developing countries, pp. 203-214,  2006

​Policy Reports:
  • Spatial Gaps in Management Quality: Evidence from a Lagging Region in Croatia (with A. Grover and L. Iacovone) [pdf]
    • ​World Bank Policy Research Working Paper No. 9213, World Bank: Washington DC
  • Mainstreaming Gender in Trade Policy – A Case Study on Bhutan [link]
    • UNCTAD 
  • ​Asian and African Development Trajectories: Revisiting Facts and Figures (with G. Carbonnier and E. Dalle Mulle) [link]
    • International Development Policy Brief, Graduate Institute (IHEID), Geneva 
​
Media and Other Writings:
Future Research:
  • Does Gender Reform Affect Financial Behaviour of Firms? New Evidence from India (with S. Banerjee, U. Banerjee, S. K. Ritadhi)
  • Trade and Occupational Groups: Evidence from Brazil (with L. Paz)
  • Trade and Outsourced Jobs (with L. Castro and V.  Tyazhelnikov)
  • Trade and Networks (with D. DeSilva, M. Chen, and H. Yang)