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2751 items in total found

Working Papers | 2020

Pandemics and Historical Mortality in India

Chinmay Tumbe

This paper presents selected historical mortality statistics of India and analyses their characteristics and trends. Statistics are collated from a wide range of sources as time series at different regional scales, and particularly for the pandemics related with cholera, plague and influenza between 1817 and 1920. The paper analyses rare burial records in 19th century Calcutta, constructs the global distribution of deaths due to pandemic cholera in the 19th and early 20th century, and provides new mortality estimates of the 1918 influenza pandemic in India. The paper also presents a bibliography of over 250 studies on pandemics and historical mortality in India.

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Working Papers | 2020

Public-Private Partnership (PPP) in Indian Railways: Models, Framework, and Policies

K. Sitharamaraju, Santhosh Kumar Beerelli, Saket Anil Yelne, and Sundaravalli Narayanaswami

Indian Railways is the backbone of Indias public transportation network. The Railway Ministry is one of the vital ministries of the Government of India with the mandate to provide economic and efficient rail transportation in India to achieve the twin goals of economic integration and regional development. Based on a detailed study of IR projects and large infrastructure projects in other sectors, we propose certain key recommendations.

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Working Papers | 2020

Enhancing Port Performance: A Case of Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust

Aman Rathi, Ambesh Pratap Singh, and Sundaravalli Narayanaswami

Ports are critical infrastructure and contribute significantly to international trade. They play a crucial role in connecting developing countries to the global market and boost the business and growth of the economy. This infrastructure is growing and becoming more complex. Hence, there is a demand for performance indicators to measure competitiveness and undertake strategic planning for improving them. Port performance tools can be an internal strategic management tool and benchmarking tool across the network of ports. This study is on evaluating operational efficiency of a port, and application of the approach for Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust (JNPT) and diagnose and recommend areas of improvement.

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Working Papers | 2020

How informative are quantified survey data? Evidence from RBI household inflation expectations survey

Gaurav Kumar Singh

Quantification of the ordinal survey responses on inflation expectations ease and important preliminary step for undertaking further macroeconomic analysis of the data. In this paper, we briefly describe the standard quantification methods along with the underlying assumptions. We also propose two new methods for Quantification. We than apply these methods to quantify the IESH data collected by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). An interesting fact that emerges from this exercise is simpler quantification methods are found to perform better that more complex methods for IESH data. Also, the methods with time varying weights or time varying thresholds, as the case may be, work significantly better.

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Working Papers | 2020

Expectations formation of household inflation expectations in India

Gaurav Kumar Singh

Inflation expectations data are commonly used to address a number of important questions primarily related to the inflation expectations formation. This work presents such an empirical analysis of Reserve Bank of India's (RBI) inflation expectations data for Indian urban population. First, we apply a battery of tests for verifying the assumptions of rationality of household expectations. The tests lead to the outright rejection of the assumptions. On the other hand, the inflation forecasts by professional forecasters seem to support the rational expectations assumptions. Second, considering a regression model we find that the inflation forecasts by the professionals forecast the actual inflation better than what could be predicted by the recently available actual inflation data. Finally, using a sticky information model (Mankiw Reis (2001, 2002), Carroll (2003)) we also find the support for Carroll's contention that relevant macroeconomic information about future inflation flows from experts to the households, not vice versa. Additionally, if the sticky inflation model describes the household inflation expectations formation, it is natural to expect that more news about inflation in the news channels would lead to the reduction of disagreement. Our empirical analysis using Google trend data supports this hypothesis.

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Working Papers | 2020

Public perception of courts in India: unmeasured gap between the justice system and its beneficiaries

M.P. Ram Mohan, Muhammed K Faisal, Jacob P Alex, and M V Shiju

Understanding how people view the courts and the legal profession helps in identifying some areas of friction, and thereby provides critical insights into the measures needed to improve the working and management of the justice delivery process. This study examines the influence of gender, age, education and court experience on citizens' perception of the Ernakulam District and Sessions Court, Kerala-a state with the highest social indicators in India. Using a total sample of two hundred and fifty (n=250) respondents, the study assessed perception of the court using three attitudinal scales, perception of the court's concern and respect, fair procedure and outcome, and overall perception of the court. A multivariate regression analysis was used to gauge the significance of the influence of each demographic factor and court experience on the respondents' perception of the court. We find respondents with personal experience in courts perceive it negatively; gender has no significant influence on attitudes toward the court; and regardless of their demographic characteristics and court experience, people perceive the court as being too costly and too slow for settling legal disputes.

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Working Papers | 2020

A Predictive and Prescriptive Analytics Framework for Efficient E-Commerce Order Delivery

Shanthan Kandula, Srikumar Krishnamoorthy, and Debjit Roy

Achieving timely last-mile order delivery is often the most challenging part of an e-commerce order fulfillment. Effective management of last-mile operations can result in significant cost savings and lead to increased customer satisfaction. Currently, due to the lack of customer availability information, the schedules followed by delivery agents are optimized for the shortest tour distance. Therefore, orders are not delivered in customer-preferred time periods resulting in missed deliveries. Missed deliveries are undesirable since they incur additional costs. In this paper, we propose a decision support framework that is intended to improve delivery success rates while reducing delivery costs. Our framework generates delivery schedules by predicting the appropriate delivery time periods for order delivery. More specifically, the proposed framework works in two stages. In the first stage, order delivery success for every order throughout the delivery shift is predicted using machine learning models. The predictions are used as an input for the optimization scheme, which generates delivery schedules in the second stage. The proposed framework is evaluated on two real-world datasets collected from a large e-commerce platform. The results indicate the effectiveness of the decision support framework in enabling savings of up to 10.6% in delivery costs when compared to the current industry practice.

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Working Papers | 2020

THE PRE-KAUTILYAN PERIOD:
CRUCIBLE OF PROTO ECONOMIC IDEAS AND PRACTICES

Satish Y. Deodhar

A number of studies have been conducted in the recent past throwing light on Kautilya's contribution to economic policy. In his treatise Arthashastra, Kautilya informs that his contribution was based on received knowledge and gives credit to his predecessors. Unfortunately, the specialized works of the predecessors have been lost with the passage of time. I have attempted to scout and collate the economic notions that have appeared interspersed in the available Sanskrit treatises written prior to Arthashastra. Kautilya's Arthashastra must have evolved from the crucible of such literature. In this context I discuss the four-fold classifications of purusharthas, ashramas, and varnas referenced in ancient texts and their attendant economic implications in the society then. I also cover the economic notions at the macro and institutional level which include policies of a welfare state, practical ideas about public goods, market facilitation, property rights, labour relations and unions, coinage, taxation, and budget deficit.

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Working Papers | 2020

The Implications of Economic Uncertainty for Bank Loan Portfolios

Sanket Mohapatra and Siddharth M. Purohit

This paper analyses the impact of economic uncertainty on the composition of bank credit across household and firm loans. Using bank-level data spanning 40 developed and developing countries, we find that higher economic uncertainty is associated with an increase in the relative share of household credit in the loan portfolio of banks. This change in composition of credit may result from banks efforts to reduce the overall riskiness of their loan portfolios, since corporate loans are generally viewed as riskier than household loans. This shift is more pronounced for weakly-capitalized banks, which may face greater risks during economic shocks, and for larger banks, which may be riskier due to complex business models and more market-based activities. The variation in our main findings by banks capitalization and size suggests that they arise from changes in bank credit supply in response to greater uncertainty. The baseline results hold for a range of robustness tests. Our study highlights the role of aggregate uncertainty in micro-level outcomes and are relevant for bank capital regulation and the conduct of macroprudential policy.

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Working Papers | 2020

The Doctrine of Frustration under section 56 of the Indian Contract Act

M.P. Ram Mohan, Promode Murugavelu, Gaurav Ray, and Kritika Parakh

The performance of obligations under a contract may be hindered by unexpected supervening events, leading to contractual uncertainties. The doctrine of frustration paves the way for a just consequence of such an unfortunate event, which has happened without any fault of the contracting parties. The doctrine fills the void in a contract regarding supervening events, based on principles of fairness and equity. Considering the large implications on the obligatory and binding nature of a valid contract, it becomes important to analyse the factors that guide the courts to determine its application. Unlike common law, the Indian Contract law explicitly incorporates the doctrine of frustration under section 56 of the Contract Act. However, the evolution of this doctrine in India has been greatly influenced by English law. This paper attempts to restate the law on the doctrine of frustration as applicable in India.

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