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Karan Bhasin
Karan Bhasin is a young economist who holds a master's degree from TERI School of Advanced Studies and a bachelor's degree in economics from The University of London. He is presently a graduate student and is currently based out of New York. He has diverse research interests spanning areas such as Macroeconomics, Monetary Economics, and political economy. He has worked with multiple think tanks, government agencies and multilateral institutions in the past. A regular columnist, he writes for major digital publishing platforms, leading Indian magazines and newspapers.
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Female labour force participation: Measurement and data quality
Official data revealed a sharp decline in female labour force participation in India between 2004-05 and 2011-12, despite fast economic growth in the country. Examining the measurement of women’s work and data quality issues, this article identifies three explanations for the low observed female labour force participation: inconsistent treatment of non-market work, more women in higher education, and the disproportionate time spent by women on childcare
Measuring poverty in the absence of Consumption Expenditure Survey data
In the first post of a six-part series on , Surjit Bhalla and Karan Bhasin discuss issues related to measurement of absolute poverty in India. They summarise their IMF working paper from April 2022, and defend their assumption of unity pass-through and impact of food transfers. They point out shortcomings in certain measurement approaches, including the World Bank’s reliance on the outdated Uniform Recall Period, and cite other poverty estimates which corroborate their own findings.
Synthetic Control Method: Opportunity for policy evaluation
Policy evaluation involves estimating the effect of an intervention, by comparing outcomes in units subjected to the intervention with otherwise similar units not subjected to intervention. However, this may be challenging if there is no appropriate comparison group. In this post, Karan Bhasin discusses how the ‘Synthetic Control Method’ can work in such cases, and its application for evaluating the impact of policies such as inflation targeting.