Here are some papers I wrote and presented prior to my PhD:
2020
Inflation Targeting in the United Kingdom: Is there Evidence for Asymmetric Preferences? (with Dr. Naveen Srinivasan)
Master Thesis, Madras School of Economics
In recent times, inflation targeting has been one of the most successful monetary frameworks in advanced economics. However, critics claim that policy rates have been kept higher than necessary. They claim that central banks did not pursue a symmetric inflation target. If a central bank pursues symmetric inflation and output targets, the optimal monetary policy response is a linear forward-looking Taylor rule (Clarida et al., 1999). We use the Linex Loss function as outlined in Nobay and Peel (2003) to relax the assumption of symmetric preferences. The presence of asymmetric preferences implies that monetary policy reacts not only to the conditional expectation of inflation and output gap but also to their conditional variances. Non-linear Taylor rules are estimated on UK data from 1995: Q2 and 2003: Q3. The results support the critics. Inflation targeting was indeed pursued with asymmetric preferences. The findings are robust to the Bank of England's ex-ante forecasts, 'real-time' estimates of the output gap, non-linearities in the supply curve, and alternative forecast horizons. Policy rates have been about 30 basis points higher than necessary due to asymmetric preferences.
2017
Volatility, Persistence and Synchronisation in Indian State Business Cycles (1960-2014)
Research Internship, Reserve Bank of India
This paper studies Indian state business cycles in the period 1960-2014. The Hodrick-Prescott filter is applied on log-linearised Annual Net State Domestic Product (at Constant Factor Prices) to obtain estimates of state cycles. These were consequently analysed. After liberalisation in 1991, state business cycles were less volatile and more serially correlated. Across time, average volatility has fallen and first order auto-correlation has risen. In the post reform period, some states were less synchronised, with the national cycle, but average synchronisation of all states has been increasing over time. The largest Indian states were even more synchronised. Robustness checks show that these results always hold at larger values of the smoothening parameter and at different sizes of the rolling window. However the finding that volatility has fallen, holds even at smaller values of the smoothening parameter.
Findings of a Socio-economic Survey of Pavement Dwelling families in Central Kolkata
Sociology Seminar, Presidency University
This paper is based on one of two socioeconomic surveys that took place in August and October of 2013 respectively. The first survey covered 30 pavement dwellers living in College Street, Central Kolkata. The first survey was preceded by a few field tests, and used a quantitative household questionnaire that pertained to basic socio-economic indicators. This survey was preceded by field tests in College Street itself. The second survey covered 196 households living in various parts of central Kolkata. It also was designed to cover the individuals within households, and along with data on 196 households it has data on the 524 individuals within it. This survey was also preceded by extensive field testing to expose faults in the questionnaire. This paper presents the findings of the second survey.