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How Atal Pension Yojana is helping Indians save for retirement

Government of India’s contributory pension scheme, Atal Pension Yojana, encourages citizens to save for retirement. This study finds that APY not only provides a basic pension, but also promotes bro...

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The State within India’s corporate bond market

The value of gross issuances in India’s corporate bond market has grown by 150% over the past decade. In this post, Harsh Vardhan contends that while the market has become bigger, reforms are needed...

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Finance for small-firm growth: Towards flexibility and innovation

While microfinance contract innovations like repayment grace periods help small-firm owners, they can increase default rates for microfinance institutions. Based on field experiments in Pakistan and K...

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Who holds sovereign debt and why it matters

Knowing who invests in sovereign debt and how they impact borrowing costs could help governments understand how costly it would be to raise new debt. This article constructs and analyses data on the c...

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The past and future of Indian finance

In the fourth article in the Ideas@IPF2023 series, Ruchir Agarwal describes the impact of two economic shocks – the financial crisis of 2018-20 and the Covid-19 pandemic – on the Indian financial ...

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Is the RBI’s commitment to inflation targeting credible?

Eight years after the adoption of Flexible Inflation Targeting (FIT) by the RBI, Garga, Lakdawala and Sengupta evaluate the success of this framework. They use two approaches to assess the credibility...

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UPI: A game changer towards achieving a cashless economy

Since the launch of the Unified Payment Interface (UPI), the volume of digital transactions in India has increased exponentially over the last few years. Shamim Ara highlights the trends in the expans...

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The post-pandemic credit landscape in India

The economic shock caused by the Covid-19 pandemic and longstanding structural issues like the NPA crisis with its associated risk aversion in the banking sector resulted in low bank credit growth in...

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Bank failures: what’s the Fed’s role?

Silicon Valley Bank is the largest bank failure in the US since the 2008 financial crisis. Viral Acharya and Raghuram Rajan reflect on this and attribute the bank’s collapse to more than bankers’ ...

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The disruptive market power of foreign portfolio investors in the face of tax threat

Foreign portfolio investors in emerging markets are known to exit host capital markets promptly if any policy changes impose additional costs. Based on an analysis of daily trading data during a perio...

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The low productivity trap of collateralised lending for MSMEs

The share of bank credit extended to MSMEs increased dramatically during the pan-demic. In this post, Harsh Vardhan discusses the the government guarantee of bank loans as a possible driver of this gr...

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How NBFCs are reinventing MSME finance

Even though micro and small enterprises make up over 99% of MSMEs in India, they receive a relatively small proportion of bank credit. Chandra and Muthusamy look at how lending to MSMEs has evolved ov...

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Accumulation of household debt in India: Repercussions for economic recovery

The Covid-19 crisis and the subsequent recession has brought about a shift in financial savings; households have cut back on consumption and reduced their demand for credit, and banks tightened lendin...

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Not exactly bad news: Fed tightening cycle’s implications for emerging markets

The conventional perception, that US Federal Reserve rate hikes necessarily imply capital outflows from emerging markets, is an incomplete assessment. This article disaggregates Fed hikes’ effects o...

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Can access to finance spur entrepreneurship in Indian informal sector?

Credit constraints, a consequence of the widespread failure of credit markets in developing countries, are widely regarded as a key constraint to entrepreneurship. Using 2010-11 and 2015-16 National S...

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Recent Contributors

Sunil

Sunil Mani

CDS and Ahmedabad University

Subhadeep

Subhadeep Halder

Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi

Sameedh

Sameedh Sharma

King's College London

Debasis

Debasis Rooj

FLAME University

Reshmi

Reshmi Sengupta

FLAME University

Harsh

Harsh Vardhan

Management Consultant and Researcher

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India’s insurance sector: Challenges and opportunities

While India’s insurance sector has been growing dynamically in recent years, its share in the global insurance market remains abysmally low. This article traces the journey of the Indian insurance s...

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Financial inclusion in India: Progress and prospects

Financial inclusion is globally considered as a critical indicator of development and well-being of society. In this post, Srinivasa Rao traces the financial inclusion journey in India so far, and dis...

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RBI’s costly experiments with the currency

During 2023-2024, the average annual volatility of the rupee-dollar exchange rate was 1.8% – the lowest in over two decades. In this post, Patnaik, Pandey and Sengupta explain why sudden and sharp l...

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