Department of Economics

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;

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

Ashoka University

The National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) in India is one of the largest public employment programs in the developing world. It was introduced by the central government led by Indian National Congress (INC). While it's implementation is, in principle, based on demand for work from households, we investigate how political competition affects intra district allocation of funds under the scheme. Using longitudinal data on funds allocated to blocks and elections held for block councils, we find that greater amount of funds were allocated to blocks where INC had lower seat share. Further, we address the issue of endogeneity by focusing on a subsample of blocks where the aggregate vote share of INC was close to that of it's rivals. Our results suggest that 1.5 percentage point more funds were approved for blocks that had 1 percentage point lower seat share for INC. We also provide a mechanism for the effect by showing that the results are only true when the MP of the district, a member of the body that approves the block fund allocation, is from INC.

World University root node

Fulltext

European Journal of Political Economy

Local funds and political competition: Evidence from the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme in India

Budget 2016-17 correctly recognises that the economy is facing a demand slowdown but fails to back this up with necessary expenditure to boost aggregate demand. Guided by its programme of fiscal consolidation, the government has almost frozen public investment in order to achieve the targeted deficit for 2016-17. While its proclamation to improve ordinary lives is welcome, a rearrangement of deep-rooted structures of public expenditure in India is required to achieve this.

Economic and Political Weekly

Budget without Heft

In this article, we discuss the possibility of economics as a discipline emulating the success of hard sciences. In our view, a fundamental obstacle arises from the fact that economics does not have (m)any stable and robust laws governing economic systems that hold true irrespective of the source of data. One possible but untested way to introduce some of the evolving features of large scale economic systems, e.g. out-of-equilibrium dynamics and finite rationality, is evolutionary game theory.

European Physical Journal: Special Topics

Absence of economic and social constants

The expansion of microfinance has triggered concerns of rising indebtedness and higher default and interest rates. Using a screening model, we show that even if interest and default rates increase due to expansion, borrower welfare may improve. This is because: (i) all borrowers previously denied credit can obtain loans and (ii) screening costs for pre-existing borrowers go down. Hence, policies that seek to regulate interest and screening levels can be counterproductive.

Economic Modelling

Expansion and welfare in microfinance: A screening model

We define the logit dynamic for games with continuous strategy sets and establish its fundamental properties, namely, the existence of a logit equilibrium, its convergence to a Nash equilibrium as the perturbation factor becomes small and existence, uniqueness and continuity of solution trajectories. We apply the dynamic to the analysis of potential games and negative semidefinite games. We show that in a restricted state space of probability measures with bounded density functions, solution trajectories of the logit dynamic converge to logit equilibria in these two classes of games.

Games and Economic Behavior

The logit dynamic for games with continuous strategy sets

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Economics and Finance

Missing women: A review of underlying causes and policy responses

Using a massive malaria eradication program in India during the 1950s as a natural experiment, we examine the effects of disease environment on child health outcomes and fertility. We harmonize a rich dataset on malaria endemicity with fertility histories of women to exploit the cohort level variation in exposure to the program. We find that the program leads to a significant decline in infant and neonatal mortality and leads to a significant increase in the probability of birth during adolescent years in high malaria-endemic regions. We confirm that a fall in the mother's age at first birth in the post-eradication period drives the fertility response.