Distance-to-default (DtD) from the Merton model has been used in the credit risk literature, most successfully as an input into reduced form models for forecasting default. In this paper, we suggest that the change in the DtD is informative for predicting change in the credit rating. This is...

In 2003, trading of commodity futures shifted from single commodity, regional exchanges to national exchanges that trade multiple commodities. This paper examines price discovery and hedging effectiveness of commodity futures after this change and concludes that,on average, futures prices do...

The causal impact of algorithmic trading on market quality has been difficult to establish due to endogeneity bias. We address this problem by using the introduction of co-location, an exogenous event after which algorithmic trading is known to increase. Matching procedures are used to identify...

Stock futures offer leveraged positions and are expected to attract informed traders. However, many researchers have found that the information share of the stock futures is surprisingly small; the equity spot market appears to play a large role in price discovery. In this paper, we investigate...

Ambient levels of viable bioaerosol were measured at four different sites on the campus of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, India. Most of the viable bioaerosol was associated with the fungal fraction with the remainder due to bacteria. The highest concentrations of fungi were found...

Value-at-Risk (VaR) is widely used as a tool for measuring the market risk of asset portfolios. However, alternative VaR implementations are known to yield fairly different VaR forecasts. Hence, every use of VaR requires choosing among alternative forecasting models. This paper undertakes two...

Regulation of retail finance has been the subject of policy interventions in several countries, including India. Much of the regulatory change in India has been carried out with little support of empirical evidence. This paper is motivated by questions of the evidence of losses due to mis-sales...

In December 2010, the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh passed a law that severely restricted the operations of micro-finance institutions and brought the micro-finance industry to an abrupt halt. We measure the impact of micro-credit withdrawal in this unique natural experiment and find that...

This paper presents two approaches that use publicly available data to estimate the loss to investors from mis-selling of insurance products. The first approach uses the number of lapsed policies from the annual reports of the insurance regulator, IRDA, while the second method uses the...