Research – Gunjan Sharma
Publications
Journal of Development Economics (2011) Abstract: We investigate
the relationship between economic deregulation, skill upgrading, and wage
inequality during the 1980s and 1990s in India. We use a unique dataset on
India’s industrial licensing regime to test whether industrial
deregulation during the 1980s and 1990s played a role in generating demand
for skilled workers and in widening the skill-wage gap. Further, we examine
the relationship between India’s external sector reforms during and
after 1991 and skill upgrading. World
Bank Economic Review, May 2006, Volume 20, No. 2, pp. 241-259. Abstract: Preferential trade arrangements should be evaluated by their effect on prices rather than by their effect on the total value of trade. This point is emphasized in the theoretical literature but rarely implemented empirically. This article analyzes the U.S. Caribbean Basin Initiative’s (CBI’s) impact on the prices received by eligible apparel exporters. The CBI’s apparel preferences are the most important and heavily used unilateral preferences because of high trade barriers imposed on exports from the rest of the world. A fixed-effects generalized least squares (GLS) estimation is used to isolate the effects of other factors (such as quality, exchange rates, and transaction costs) and to identify the effects of tariff preferences. CBI exporters capture only about two-thirds of their preference margin despite the high degree of competition among importers. This translates into a 9 percent increase in the relative prices they receive, with some variance across countries and years. Countries specializing in higher value items capture more of the preference margin, and the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) has a negative effect. Removing Multi-fibre Arrangement quotas significantly lowers the benefits of CBI preferences. Working Papers
Abstract: This paper investigates the determinants of spatial
concentration and entry within manufacturing across states in India. Using an
unbalanced panel of 180 industries spread across 16 major Indian states over
the time period 1985-2007, we estimate the effect of location (state)
characteristics interacted with characteristics that make industries
naturally more prone to concentrate in locations (states) of certain types on
spatial concentration and entry. The results show that governance, infrastructure
and the availability of skilled labor are important determinants of increased
concentration and entry. Moreover, the estimates indicate that state
characteristics associated with lower distance to foreign markets, lower
costs of accessing domestic suppliers, or lower costs of doing business
matter for the impact of licensing, FDI and trade reforms on concentration
and new entry. There is also evidence that less substitutable inputs (e.g.,
roads) raise spatial concentration while more substitutable inputs (e.g.,
electricity) do not. Revision
Requested Using data on formal
manufacturing plants in India, we report a large but imprecise acceleration
in productivity growth starting around the mid-1990s (e.g. 1993-2004 compared
to 1980-1992). We trace the acceleration to productivity growth within large
plants (200 workers or more), as opposed to reallocation across such plants.
As many economists believe Indian reforms during this era improved resource
allocation, the absence of a growth pickup from reallocation is surprising.
Moreover, when we look across industries we fail to robustly relate
productivity growth to prominent reforms such as industrial de-licensing,
tariff reductions, FDI liberalization, or lifting of small-scale industry
reservations. Even under a generous reading of their effects, these reforms (at
least as we measure them) seem to account for less than one-quarter of
overall productivity growth. Review
requested We use plant-level data from India for the period 1980-99 to examine
the impact of industrial and trade policy reforms on the geographic agglomeration
of manufacturing industries measured by the Ellison and Glaesar
(1997) index (EG index). . First, we find that, after controlling for
standard determinants of agglomeration, a standard deviation in the
proportion of output de-licensed or FDI-liberalized reduced the EG index by
22% and 6% respectively while trade reforms had no significant effect.
Secondly, the response of agglomeration to various mechanisms exhibits significant
plant size-based differences. Trade liberalization significantly reduced
concentration for large plants , while there was no
impact for medium and small plants. De-licensing increased spatial
concentration of medium and large plants and reduced agglomeration of small
plants. FDI deregulation caused large plants to agglomerate and small plants
to disperse. Our results are robust to the use of FGLS techniques to correct for
heteroskedasticity and to the control for persistence in the
agglomeration process as well as to a wide variety of fixed effects and
specification tests. 4. Working Paper
(October 2008): Crime and Inequality in India (this version Jan 2010)
Under
Review Abstract: We examine
the relationship between crime and inequality in Indian districts in 1988 and
2004. We find that inequality increases most types of property and violent
crime and that inequality within religious and caste groups drive this
relationship. Our results are robust to district fixed effects as well as to
controls for the costs and benefits of criminal activity. We then use
geographically weighted regressions to estimate local models of the
relationship between crime and inequality across Indian districts. Our
results show a divergence in the magnitude and statistical significance of
the inequality coefficient in global and local models. In addition, there
exists substantial spatial variation in the correlation between both property
and violent crime and inequality, which supports the need for spatial
analysis. Global and local models reveal a weakening relationship between all
types of crime and inequality in 2004 compared to 1988, which may be due to
declining crime levels or inter-temporal variation in the underreporting of
crime. Abstract: We investigate the link between industrial deregulation,
trade reform and unit-level productivity using two unique microeconomic data
sets from India. We use disaggregated data on the dismantling of the the “License Raj” in India (operating from
the 1950s onwards) and find that removal of microeconomic constraints (that
accompanied a license to produce) as well a rise in the threat of potential
entry raised output per worker by 8.5%-17%. We also exploit the chronology of
reforms in India and find that industries and firms that were de-licensed in
the 1980s tend to perform better vis productivity
after trade liberalization in 1991. We use an administrative requirement of
the “Licensing Raj” to identify the impact of de-licensing
–size-based exemption from licensing requirements. This institutional
feature provides within-industry variation as well as a specification test
– we conduct the analysis for hypothetical thresholds (that is, we
falsely assign firms to the treatment) and find that there is no size-based
response to de-licensing around these artificial thresholds. We also create a
psuedo-panel of firms and find that our results are
robust to firm-fixed effects. Permanent
Working Paper
|
|
|
|
|