WORKING PAPERS / WORK IN PROGRESS / ACCEPTED PAPERS


Older Version 1 presented at the Royal Economic Society PhD Conference at the University of Portsmouth December 2024, 19th Annual Conference on Economic Growth and Development at Indian Statistical Institute Delhi December 2024, CAFRAL (RBI) Annual Research Conference December 2024.

Older Version 2 presented at the Asia Meeting of the Econometric Society (AMES) 2024, International Conference on Recent Developments in Economics Research: Theory and Evidence at CITD JNU 2024, Meeting of Young Minds in Frontiers of Economics by INET-YSI at IIT Bombay 2024, and the Work in Progress seminar at IIT Delhi 2023.

Abstract: Analyzing redistribution from monetary policy changes demands close attention to economies where traditional agriculture with volatile output prices employs a substantial share of the working population and a major proportion of households live hand-to-mouth with a high marginal propensity to consume. This paper quantifies redistribution using a Heterogeneous Agent New Keynesian model tailored to fit these particularities with a prototypical case for the Indian economy. It offers new insights into monetary policy transmission and challenges the preconceptions about its impact that are predominantly explored in advanced economy contexts. The overall consumption responses to a policy expansion of 0.5% point quarterly and 1% point yearly vary between 1.26% − 2.80% and 3.96% − 8.46%, higher than what is observed in the US, major European economies, and the Euro-area averages. It also argues that households engaged in agricultural activities respond weakly to policy intervention.


Older Version, Another older version of this paper titled "Welfare Analysis of Monetary Policy in India Using Household Survey Data" was presented at the Asia Meeting of The Econometric Society 2023, the Society of Economic Research India Doctoral Conference 2022, and the Work in Progress Seminar at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi 2022.

Abstract: A change in the conventional monetary policy transmits to consumer prices and returns on financial assets, leading to a series of general equilibrium effects on household income and consumption. This paper, for the first time, quantifies these effects using compensating variation estimated from numerous household surveys in India. Various data limitations motivate the use of machine learning techniques for out of sample predictions, thus paving the way toward utilizing these tools for more comprehensive and granular level policy analysis. A 100 basis point contractionary monetary policy intervention leads to an average welfare effect of Rs. 606.51 in rural households and Rs. 3772.81 in urban households, which vary substantially over different sources of heterogeneity and different channels of transmission. While below poverty line households are majorly affected by the labor income channels, rich households experience welfare effects contingent on their financial asset portfolios. Commodity price channels are relatively weaker and muted in richer households.


Abstract: Bauer et al. (2022) derive market-based monetary policy uncertainty and uncover an `FOMC uncertainty cycle' characterized by a fall of uncertainty after FOMC announcements and its subsequent built-up. Then, the authors show that the financial markets' response to monetary policy announcements depends on the level of short-rate uncertainty on the day before the FOMC announcement. First, we reproduced the paper's findings, though with Matlab version-specific issues. Second, we tested the robustness of the two main results of the paper. We show that the uncertainty cycle in the monetary policy uncertainty is confirmed when the crisis period is included in the sample or when the median instead of the average of changes in the monetary policy uncertainty is considered. However, the FOMC uncertainty cycle does not appear when the monetary policy uncertainty index Husted et al. (2020) or the daily economic policy uncertainty index Baker et al. (2016) are used as uncertainty proxies.


Presented at the 20th Annual Conference on Economic Growth and Development at Indian Statistical Institute Delhi December 2025, 10th Delhi Macroeconomics Workshop October 2025, and the Work in Progress seminar at IIT Delhi 2024.

Abstract: The Reserve Bank of India kept the monetary policy rate persistently low and unrevised between May 2020 and April 2022 to encourage economic activity in battling the COVID-19 pandemic shock. In this paper, I argue that this stance by the central bank, in contrast to the conventional flexible inflation targeting, is beneficial for the economy, especially in the recovery periods. I find that economic activity through increased capital demand and output by heterogeneous firms led to a slightly higher share of formal employment, hence a reduced share of informal labor. The differences in the magnitude of responses under the lower for longer stance versus the flexible inflation targeting are highest among firms with less volatile beliefs. Households, on the other hand, react quite similarly. Among heterogeneous households, households with formal employment are least impacted by the pandemic shocks and they respond first to the lower rate. 



To be presented in the World Inequality Conference at Paris School of Economics, June 2026.


Abstract: This study investigates how extreme inequality influences economic growth through demand composition and sectoral differences in production. Drawing on household and firm level data, we document pronounced segmentation in consumption: poorer households devote substantially larger shares of their budgets to informal, relatively low quality mass produced goods, while richer households allocate more to formal and labor intensive high quality goods. These findings build the foundation of a simplistic model featuring non-homothetic preference and dual production structures, aimed to replicate the stylised facts from data, to examine how redistribution will shift economic growth. This paper contributes an integrated theoretical empirical account of the inequality growth dynamics in demand constrained, structurally heterogeneous economies.