Ashoka University is a private university located in Sonipat, Haryana, India, focusing on liberal arts and sciences. It was established in 2014.&nbsp;It is guided by an academic council of academics and scholars from around the world. The council sets the university&#39;s academic standard, advising on matters of curriculum, faculty hiring and research.&nbsp;

Ashoka University offers a full-time 3 (+ 1) year undergraduate programme. The University comprises of&nbsp;2500 plus students, with a mix of both national and international students.&nbsp; &nbsp;

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Ashoka University

The global output of food staples is far more stable than most individual nations&#39; outputs, but does this lead to consumption risk sharing? This paper applies tools from the risk sharing literature to address this question for rice, wheat, and maize, using a multilateral risk sharing model that, unlike the canonical model, accounts for trade costs. While the data show that optimal risk sharing does not occur, the wheat market comes closest to the idealized model. Our analysis also implies that both trade and storage play significant roles in smoothing domestic output shocks. Further, we find that risk sharing tends to rise with a nation&#39;s income.&nbsp;

Department of Economics

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Journal of Development Economics

International risk sharing for food staples

Farmers in developing countries have little voice in influencing agricultural research. However, they are not without political influence. The tension between these understandings is examined by investigating the importance of farmers in the political economy of genetically modified crop approvals in India. The evidence shows that while farmers may not be important in shaping policy, they have the clout to defeat it.

Economic and Political Weekly

The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology: Farmers, Media, and Opinion in India

The aggregate cost of the living index requires averaging across household indices. But what if the aggregate index was constructed for the “representative” household as is usually done? The paper examines the resulting bias in the Tornqvist index, widely used for constructing superlative indices as well as for the Cobb–Douglas index, which has a similar functional form. We show that the difference between the two consists of a “plutocratic” bias and a “curvature” bias. The former is well known, but the latter has not been recognized earlier. In empirical applications, the curvature bias is small and orders of magnitude smaller than the plutocratic bias. This suggests much of the overall bias would be removed by constructing the representative agent by democratic averages of budget shares.