The US–Israel military operation against Iran (February 2026) and Iran’s retaliatory activities including closure of the Strait of Hormuz have triggered a large energy supply shock for India, the world’s third-largest oil importer. This paper provides a bottom-up fiscal accounting of the shock’s impact on the Indian central government’s budget for FY 2025–26 and FY 2026–27. We trace the transmission through five channels: higher fertiliser subsidies (costlier domestic gas, costlier urea imports, costlier DAP imports), higher LPG subsidies, foregone excise rev- enue from the Special Additional Excise Duty (SAED) cut on petrol and diesel, a modest customs duty gain, and foregone petroleum-sector dividends. Under our primary scenario (war through June 2026), the additional fiscal deficit in FY 2026– 27 is Rs. 74,087 crore, pushing the deficit from 4.30% to 4.49% of GDP. In the worst case (war through December), the deficit reaches 4.99% of GDP, a deviation of 0.69 percentage points from the Budget target.

We investigate the influence of market competition heterogeneity across package sizes on a firm’s pricing strategy. We focus on the transition from quantity discounts (common practice) to quantity surcharges (charging more for larger packages) and hypothesise that firms adopt surcharges when competition is significantly higher in the smaller-package market. Using a survey of 38 grocery stores, we find that the adoption of surcharges rises alongside substantial disparities in competition between sizes, as measured by brand availability. We posit that varying demand elasticities between pack sizes, driven by heterogeneous consumer preferences, may underpin this competition divergence and subsequent pricing strategy shifts. Our findings contribute to the understanding of pricing dynamics under asymmetric competition and offer insights for firms navigating competitive landscapes across product formats.

Amidst heated debates surrounding the minimum wage laws, they remain the most popular welfare tool globally. The monopsonistic character of the labour market calls for revision of the unemployment concerns. People earning minimum wage in low-income countries are different from those in high-income ones, underscoring their wide acceptance of the former. Given the job-polarizing nature of labour-replacing technologies of today, minimum wage policy is still relevant, even more so for low-income countries.

We investigate how the introduction of a zero-cost retail digital-payments rail reshapes the transmission of monetary policy through bank deposit rates. The launch of India's Unified Payments Interface (UPI) in August 2016 collapsed the cost of moving funds across bank accounts to near zero, and within a decade UPI carried more retail payment volume than every other instrument combined. We extend the canonical Monti-Klein bank profit-maximisation problem with a two-stage depositor choice: whether to hold deposits or cash, and which bank to deposit with: in which UPI affects each stage through different channels. Higher contemporaneous UPI intensity raises depositors' switching elasticity across banks; longer accumulated UPI exposure raises the non-pecuniary value of holding deposits and lowers depositors' rate-elasticity overall. The two channels predict opposite signs for the average pass-through of monetary policy. Aggregate, bank-panel, and district-panel evidence delivers four empirical regularities. Pass-through to the term-deposit rate fell post-UPI by about 1.3 percentage points at the two-year horizon; pass-through to outstanding lending rates rose by about 0.9 percentage points; deposit and credit quantities flipped sign in their response to a tightening shock; and within-period cross-sectional gradients of pass-through widen with bank-level retail-deposit shares and district-level UPI penetration. A continuous Bartik instrument identifies the duration channel from pre-determined cross-district variation. Taken jointly, the evidence indicates that UPI does not undermine monetary policy in India but shifts the margin through which policy is transmitted: from rates to quantities, and from depositors to loan demand.

When do governments shift resources away from the military? We study the sharpest systematic peacetime reallocation of the guns-to-butter margin in modern budget data: the arrival of populist rule. Combining a seven-category decomposition of public expenditure for 60 countries over 1870-2019 with head-of-government ideology data, we separate the populist component of reallocation from the ideological one. Ordinary left and right governments barely move the military's budget share. Left populists shrink it against every civilian category by 4-8 percent per year; fifteen years after entry, social protection relative to the military stands roughly 60 percent above a synthetic counterfactual built exclusively from non-populist left governments. Right populists leave the military untouched and tilt spending toward transport infrastructure instead. The pattern is consistent with a coup-risk bargain: incumbents ordinarily buy military acquiescence with budget shares, and left populists, resting on mass mobilisation, refuse to pay.

We investigate the role of contract enforcement institutions in technology adoption. Producing a technologically advanced product requires having relationship-specific investment between a producer and several input suppliers, which is moderated by the quality of contracting institutions of a country. We present some evidence on how the quality of contracting institutions is positively associated with technology adoption.

I analyze the pattern of sectoral reallocations of factor inputs in late industrializing countries. One key feature of economic growth is structural transformation, which is the reallocation of factors of production between three broad sectors of the economy - agriculture, manufacturing and services. Like the Kaldor facts of economic growth, structural transformation also exhibits an empirical regularity for advanced economies. However, the late industrializing economies do not follow the same pattern of structural transformation. Using a multi-sector general-equilibrium model, incorporating endogenous technical change, heterogeneous skills, and distance to the world technology frontier, I aim to provide an alternative formalization of structural change for today's industrializing nations.

I try to look at determinants of the falling female labour force participation rate in India. Despite the Indian economy growing on several economic indicators, the female labour force participation rate has declined strangely. I aim to exploit both supply- and demand-side factors by looking at changing women's educational levels and skill-biased technical change in a general-equilibrium macroeconomic model. In addition, I incorporate structural change in the model by exploring evolving skill levels of occupations across different economic activities.

I theoretically explore the firm strategy of offering a quantity surcharge, wherein the unit cost of a given product is higher for a larger package than for a small one, in a society with different levels of income inequality.

In countries like India, the government sets price floors for some agricultural commodities such as wheat and paddy, for various reasons. Any kind of price floor distorts the market mechanism, leading to inefficiencies in resource allocation. We study how changes in the minimum support price in India for wheat and paddy are related to the movement of labourers out of agriculture in India.

Governments hit by imported energy shocks rarely respond with textbook transfers: they suppress the prices households and firms face, and they finance the suppression through a mix of explicit budget lines and hidden channels, losses parked inside state-owned energy companies, deferred ``oil bonds,'' and recovery surcharges. We develop a theory of this fiscal boundary. A benchmark irrelevance result shows that the headline deficit carries no information about the stance of energy-fiscal policy; its three failures: fiscal rules that see only measured debt, bond markets that do not price hidden liabilities, and losses shifted to outside shareholders, characterize exactly when off-budget financing has real effects. Price suppression with recoupment is an implicit credit line for hand-to-mouth households, valuable only when relative risk aversion exceeds one (the log-utility knife edge) and repayment waits for real incomes to recover. We embed these instruments in a sixty-six-industry production-network two-agent New Keynesian model built from India's Supply-Use Table, describe its exact solution in full, and evaluate the 2026 oil-shock response against the natural alternatives. The hybrid policy cushions the downturn but defers a deeper trough; welfare gains that look large over the relief window largely vanish once the hidden bill is priced; under the monetary-dominance regime that describes India's institutions, targeted transfers dominate suppression as protection and the preferred suppression design is on-budget with income-indexed recoupment; and whether the shock is net inflationary at all is decided by the monetary rule. The fiscal machinery reproduces India's 2022-23 response out of sample.

What should an academic institution's research policy reward? Institutions around the world answer with money for measured output: per-paper bonus schedules graded by journal tier, publication-count promotion criteria, and performance-based funding formulas that price publications into budgets. We develop a multitask principal-agent model of the alternative: paying with time. Faculty differ privately in intrinsic research motivation and allocate a fixed time budget across teaching, deep research whose value is not contractible, publishable output that is, and leisure. Publication piece rates equalize the marginal value of faculty time at the piece rate itself, so time allocation stops revealing motivation: deep research is crowded out through opportunity cost alone, and incentivized output is produced by the least motivated. If incentives also erode motivation psychologically, the two channels compound and the case against piece rates is categorical, not a matter of dosage. Time, through reduced loads and research professorships carrying a compensating wage differential, simultaneously incentivizes and screens, because only the motivated convert freed time into research. The optimal policy is a balance schedule: teaching is bought out against a rising marginal replacement cost, more for the more motivated, with no distortion at the top; the familiar two-track faculty is the limiting case of flat replacement costs. Three forces explain why practice departs from this design: count-based funding rationalizes the piece rates institutions adopt; in a count-priced market, careers carry an implicit piece rate no dean set, which tenure switches off; and competition between institutions either traps all of them in the all-bonus regime or splits the market into bonus shops and time shops. The theory's answer is a mechanism: graded buyouts bundled with resources, drawn first from administrative time, at compensating wage differentials, behind tenure that grants freedom and a funding environment that prices none of it by counts.