Research

This paper evaluates whether India’s Customs Authority for Advance Rulings (CAARs) delivers the legal certainty and predictability required of an advance ruling regime under Article 3 of the WTO Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA). An analysis of CAAR decisions issued between January 2021 and December 2024 shows that fewer than 53% of rulings are delivered within the statutory three-month time frame prescribed under Indian customs law. Delays are structurally embedded in CAAR’s operating model, driven by sequential decision-making, mandatory reliance on port-level commissioner inputs, and the absence of dedicated in-house technical expertise. CAAR’s under-performance is best understood as a design failure, not a capacity constraint: port-specific applicability and a three-year validity limit undermine the very certainty that advance rulings are meant to provide, even where individual officers act diligently. The policy implications are immediate: CAAR requires a dedicated internal technical unit, explicit confirmation of nationwide binding effect, and a reassessment, if not removal of the three-year validity restriction. Treating CAAR’s shortcomings as a design flaw rather than a staffing deficit is essential to restoring confidence in advance rulings as a trade facilitation tool, aligning India’s practice with Article 3 of the TFA, and protecting legitimate reliance interests of traders and investors.

We study how U.S. monetary policy shocks transmit to cross-border merger and acquisition (M&A) activity. Using country- and firm-level data, tighter U.S. policy is shown to reduce both the value and the number of cross-border deals. The effects are especially pronounced for acquirer firms with larger foreign-currency liabilities, consistent with a net worth channel. Reflecting agency motives for acquisitions, deals announced under more accommodative U.S. conditions underperform ex post, indicating potential capital misallocation.

Electoral timing coordination represents a fundamental institutional choice with potentially significant macroeconomic consequences, yet systematic evidence remains limited. This paper exploits variation in India's multi-level electoral system to identify causal effects of synchronized elections on economic growth. Our findings can inform ongoing debates about India's proposed electoral reforms, and are also relevant for broader international debates on political economy determinants of growth in emerging markets and benefits from political unions, specifically, in the case of Europe.

Why did US inflation rise over 2021-22 and why has it retreated since then? Ball, Leigh, and Mishra (2022), writing near the inflation peak, explained the rise with a framework in which inflation depends on three factors: long-term expectations; the tightness of the labor market as measured by the vacancy-to-unemployment (V/U) ratio; and large changes in relative prices in particular industries such as energy and autos. This paper finds that the same framework explains the retreat in inflation since our earlier work.

We study a bank run in India in which private bank branches experience sudden and considerable loss of deposits, which migrate to state-owned public sector banks (PSBs) that serve as safe havens. We trace the consequences of the deposit reallocation using bank branch-level balance sheet and firm-bank lending data. The flight to safety is not a flight to quality. Lending shrinks and credit quality improves in run banks, but worsens in PSBs receiving the flight-to-safety flows. The reallocation of resources is not efficient in the aggregate.

This paper examines the effects of an alcohol prohibition law in Bihar, India, on intoxicant consumption. We implement a dynamic difference-in-difference estimation strategy using longitudinal data on monthly household expenses, exploiting state-level variation in policy exposure and household-level variation in alcohol use. We document that alcohol- consuming households in Bihar reduced their spending on tobacco products following the ban announcement, indicating complementarity between alcohol and other intoxicants; however, after its strict enforcement, when alcohol was unavailable, these households gradually increased their tobacco consumption. We find reallocation in healthcare spending: urgent medical expenses decrease with increased spending towards positive lifestyle changes.