Past Seminars

  Misled and Mis-sold: Financial misbehaviour in retail banks?  by Renuka Sane ISI, New Delhi On 22nd September, 2016 (Thuresday) at 3:00 PM Venue : Seminar Room (First Floor) Department of Economics, Delhi School of Economics All are cordially invited Abstract We use an audit methodology where auditors ask for tax saving instruments from banks and document the disclosures made on product features at the time of sale. In private sector banks with high sales incentives, the high commission product is recommended. In public sector banks, where there are deposit mobilisation targets, fixed deposits are recommended. Banks rarely make voluntary

  An Application (or Two) of the Synthetic Control Method (SCM) in Policy Evaluation  by Devesh Roy IFPRI, New Delhi On 1st September, 2016 (Thuresday) at 3:00 PM Venue : Seminar Room (First Floor) Department of Economics, Delhi School of Economics All are cordially invited Abstract We estimate the impact of the Hartz Reforms, the most prominent labor reforms in Germany since the Second World War, on the German labor market. We adopt a cross-country program evaluation approach where, employing Synthetic Control Method (SCM) for comparative case studies, we utilize the characteristics of OECD countries to construct a counterfactual for

  Student Performance and the Effects of School Quality versus School Fit by Kehinde Ajayi Boston University On 23rd August, 2016 (Tuesday) at 3:00 PM Venue : Seminar Room (First Floor) Department of Economics, Delhi School of Economics All are cordially invited Abstract This paper quantifies the effects of attending a school with high academic quality versus one with preferred characteristics. Analyzing data on secondary students in Ghana, I find that school quality generates larger benefits than school fit — students admitted to schools with high performing peers are more likely to stay in the same school and have modest

  Mandated Political Representation and Development Outcomes: Evidence from India by   Arka Roy Chaudhuri Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi On 18th August, 2016 (Thursday) at 3:00 PM  Venue : Seminar Room (First Floor) Department of Economics, Delhi School of Economics All are cordially invited   Abstract India has a history of various affirmative action policies which include political representation to erstwhile untouchable castes, Scheduled Castes. The paper estimates the causal effect of political quotas of Scheduled Castes in Indian state assemblies on development outcomes of households belonging to their own ethnic group. Specifically I look at how political reservations for

  A Possibility Theorem on Information Aggregation in Elections by Sourav Bhattacharya  Royal Holloway, University of London On 16th August, 2016 (Tuesday) at 3:00 PM Venue : Seminar Room (First Floor) Department of Economics, Delhi School of Economics All are cordially invited Abstract We study aggregation of private information in large elections where all voters have the same preference. There are many states of the world, and each state is identified with a preference ranking over alternatives and a probability distribution over signals. Each voter draws his private signal independently from the said distribution conditional on the state. When there