The paper uses firm level panel data for Indian industries in the post-reform period to study the direct and indirect productivity effects generated by foreign investment. It finds no evidence that foreign investment directly increased firm-level productivity, nor that R&D spending was more...

We examine the most likely strategy of product differentiation by newly entering multinational firms when market reforms begin in a developing economy. We argue that incumbents in a non contestable protected market do not have the usual advantages of an incumbent as in a standard sequential...

The paper models the practice of charging bribes for faster delivery of essential services in third world countries. It then examines the possibility of curbing corruption by supervision, and secondly, by introducing competition among delivery agents. It is argued that a supervisory solution...

Book Review of raghbendra Jha, M. N. Murty and Satya Paul, Pricing of Postal Services in India, national Institute of Public Finance and Policy, New Delhi, 1990, pp. 90

We introduce bureaucratic corruption in a simple way and examine its effect on government revenue when policies change. We show that a rise in the tax rate can lead to a fall in net revenue--a Laffer curve result due to the proportion of auditors that are corrupt and enforcement costs. It may...

A decision maker is contemplating an action whose outcome is state dependent. She has a ‘prior’ over the states of the world and before choosing an action, she can consult an ‘expert’. We model the communication game between the decision maker and the expert as a ‘cheap-talk’ game....

Keynes’ General Theory provides an interesting metaphor for asset markets: they are like newspaper competitions where contestants have to pick up the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, and the prize would go to one whose choice is closest to the average preferences. Keynes did not...

Suppose an agent is contemplating an action with state-contingent payoffs, and has a prior belief about the probability of the states. She hires an expert to update her priors before the action. Experts may be both informed as well as uninformed, and are not necessarily truthful. The question...

Literature presumes that exporters from small countries and particularly of primary products do not practice pricing-to-market (PTM) because of lack of market power. Out paper examines New Zealand’s pastoral exports over 1988-2002 and finds strong evidence of PTM. Evidence rejects the...