The article is essentially a book-review of Professor Vijay Joshi's recent work, '"India's Long Road: The Search for Prosperity". In this critical essay, I take a slightly revisionist approach when it comes to a 'typical'book review. For example, the length of this article goes well-beyond the...

The article is essentially a book-review of Professor Vijay Joshi's recent work, '"India's Long Road: The Search for Prosperity". In this critical essay, I take a slightly revisionist approach when it comes to a 'typical'book review. For example, the length of this article goes well-beyond the...

What policies and policy reforms can put India on the path of rapid and sustained economic growth and hence prosperity (defined in this work as average incomes close to Portugal’s and where national income is widely shared to ensure reasonable living standards for the poorest)? The analytical...

Economics

I study the evolution of aggregate volatility in the US during the postwar period by assessing the relative role played by financial shocks, technological progress, and changes in the financial system. Balance-sheet variables of firms have been characterized by greater volatility since the early...

This thesis explores the important link between macroeconomic dynamics and the financial sector. The first essay studies Epstein-Zin preferences, which are found to be able to account for both aggregate macroeconomic dynamics and asset prices. In the first essay, I compare different solution...

Developing country fiscal policy outcomes documented in data point to stark differences compared with developed ones. Most prominent difference is the excessive volatility of government consumption and transfer payments and their positive correlation relative to output. This seemingly...

Unlike the prediction of a frictionless open economy model, long-term average savings and investment rates are highly correlated across countries—a puzzle first identified by Feldstein and Horioka (1980). We quantitatively investigate the impact of two types of financial frictions on this...

This paper studies the famous Feldstein and Horioka finding, which is a high correla-tion between long period averages of savings rates and investment rates across countries. We first confirm the Feldstein-Horioka finding with a more recent data set, and then show that a calibrated complete...

Chapter 1: Optimal Long-Run Inflation with Occasionally-Binding Financial Constraints.This paper studies the optimal inflation rate in a simple New Keynesian model with occasionally-binding collateral constraints that intermediate-good firms face on hiring labor. For empirically-relevant degrees...