History of Indian Securities Market

I just discovered this link on SEBI’s website – Material on the History of Indian Securities Market.

It has some interesting pdfs documenting some history of Indian securities markets. So you have:

• historic reports on BSE,
• regulating stock exchnages,
• lok sabha debates on securities contract act,
• minutes of some key stock exchanges etc

It will be interesting if all this could culminate  into some useful research papers/project which help us understand history of India’s securities market. Along with RBI’s history, this history will help plug the gaps in overall history of Indian financial markets.

Some students could take this project actually in their internship/coursework. Pass it on to those interested.

Interview of Robert Solow

Atish Rex Ghosh of IMF does a superb interview of Robert Solow- one of the pioneers of Growth economics.

Apart from many interesting titbits, his friendship with Paul Samuelson stands out. He never moved from MIT economics departments despite many offers. Why? His condition was also to move Paul Samuelson to the other university, which worked out. Hence, he remained with Samuelson and always had an office next to him.

Another interesting bit is that with Solow’s growth paper (in which he showed the key to growth is technology), another economist named Trevor Swan also released similar findings. And Solow always acknowledges the findings:

IMF conference to discuss state of economics

IMF is organising a timely conference (7-8 Mar 2011) to discuss the state of economics after the crisis. Most beautiful economist minds are assembling for the conference - Akerlof, Stiglitz, Paul Romer, David Romer etc.

Conference is divided into six sessions:

Pocket Money – a financial literacy program for school students

National Institute of Securities Markets (set up by SEBI) has started a financial literacy program for school students. It is called Pocket Money.

Profile of John List and his field experiments

Here is a superb profile of John List of Univ of Chicago (HT. Tyler Cowen who else??).

List is one of the leading economist in the area of field experiments. The profile mentions about his amazing career and rise as a top economist. There are basically three kinds of experiments econs use: