This paper presents a new dataset of comparable employment indicators for South Asian countries, constructed from more than 60 primary data sources from 2001 to 2017. The main contribution of the paper is to curate the information provided by individual respondents to censuses and surveys, in a...

This paper analyzes whether fiscal policy in South Asia amplifies or smooths business cycle fluctuations. The paper estimates several econometric models to explore the cyclicality of government spending and tax buoyancy. The findings show that fiscal policy is procyclical in most countries. In...

Evening-hour luminosity observed using satellites is a good proxy for economic activity. The strengths of measuring economic activity using nightlight measurements include that the data capture informal activity, are available in near real-time, are cheap to obtain, and can be used to conduct...

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted economic activity in India. Adjusting policies to contain trans- mission while mitigating the economic impact requires an assessment of the economic situation in near real-time and at high spatial granularity. This paper shows that daily electricity...

This paper estimates the impact of a differential relaxation of COVID-19 containment policies on aggregate economic activity in India. Following a uniform national lockdown, the Government of India classified all districts into three zones with varying containment measures in May 2020. Using a...

With the COVID-19 pandemic, the intense debate about secular stagnation will become even more important. Empirical estimates of equilibrium real interest rates are so far mostly limited to advanced economies, since no statistical procedure suitable for a large set of countries is available. This...