On November 08, 2016, India took a decisive step towards going "cashless" by suddenly announcing withdrawal of its existing currency notes of two highest denominations, namely, the Rs. 500/= and the Rs. 1000/=. The move, announced with a suddenness that took the entire nation by surprise, had at...

This is a brief sketch of the Self Employed Women’s Association’s (SEWA) threedecade- long journey from the local to global and informal to formal sector in search of finding work and income for now 720,000 women workers. Though SEWA remains a local and an informal economy workers’...

A quantitative framework of firm dynamics is developed where the size of the informal sector is determined by financial constraints and the burden of taxation. Improving access to credit for formal sector firms increases aggregate TFP and output while reducing the size of the informal sector....

The typical size distribution of manufacturing plants in developing countries has a thick left tail compared to developed countries. The same holds across Indian states, with richer states having a much smaller share of their manufacturing employment in small plants. In this paper, I explore the...

Theory and economic intuition suggest that domestic institutions influence the employment impact of economic reform, but the evidence base is thin. This paper seeks to address this by examining the extent to which differences in regional labour market flexibility shaped the impact of...

The distribution of economic activity over physical space - economic geography - is central to economic development. Geographical variations in industrialisation are the primary factor affecting geographical variations in incomes. And so, the question of what drives industry to locate in one...

This paper evaluates critically the popular structuralist representation that those operating in the informal sector are marginalized populations working as dependent employees out of economic necessity and in the absence of alternative means of livelihood. Reporting an empirical study of 1,518...

The demonetisation exercise announced by the PM on November 8, 2016, aimed to tackle the problems of black money, fake currency, corruption, and terror funding. With time, more targets were added such as the creation of a cashless economy, curbing real estate prices, and broadening the taxpayer...

We study the impact of loan regulation in rural India on child labor with an overlapping-generations model of formal and informal lending, human capital accumulation, adverse selection, and differentiated risk types. Specifically, we build a model economy that replicates the current outcome with...