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 examine how left-wing and right-wing populist governments differ in their allocation of public expenditure and whether these composition differences contribute to government debt accumulation. Using a panel of 60 countries over 1870-2019 and applying compositional data methods to a seven-category decomposition of primary public spending, we find that left-wing populists systematically shift spending from military toward civilian categories, a "guns to butter" pattern, while right-wing populists tilt civilian spending toward social protection at the expense of education and health. Panel VAR Granger causality tests confirm that the direction of causality runs from spending composition to debt, not the reverse: military and social protection spending jointly predict debt changes (p = 0.001), while debt does not predict composition changes. A three-channel mediation analysis indicates that GDP growth losses dominate (64%), with direct deficit-financing effects of composition contributing 32% and an indirect composition-to-growth-to-debt channel contributing only 4%. Our results are robust to event-study pre-trend tests, leave-one-out analysis, lagged specifications, and sample splits by income level and region.

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.