Who owns the SNB’s profits and how are they distributed?

Thomas J. Jordan of Swiss National Bank in this speech discusses how the central bank generates and distributes its profits. SNB is different as it shares profits with Cantons/States:

The profits generated by the SNB and the distributions it makes were the subject of discussion in Switzerland long before the coronavirus pandemic broke out. There was already heated debate on this more than 100 years ago, as the rules governing the distribution of profits were one of the most contentious issues in the run-up to the creation of the SNB. The cantonal banks had to cede the right to issue banknotes to the newly established central bank, and the cantons wanted compensation in return.

The fundamental question of how the profits generated by the SNB were to be distributed already had to be addressed back then. The following principles were set: the profits should first be used to build up the SNB’s equity capital and pay a modest dividend to shareholders; and any remaining profit would go to the public sector, with at least two-thirds accruing to the cantons. While this still essentially applies today, the modalities regarding distributions and building up equity capital have been adjusted over time. I will look at the current solution in more detail presently.

The reason why the dividend payments to shareholders are limited, and why the profit distributions accrue to the confederation and the cantons, is that the SNB’s profits are not the result of how its share capital is used. Instead they stem much more from its monopoly on
issuing legal tender. The SNB generally incurs only minor costs in issuing banknotes and handling sight deposits, since manufacturing notes costs only a fraction of their nominal value and sight deposits ordinarily do not bear interest. Conversely, the SNB for its part mostly does
achieve a positive return on the assets it receives in exchange for the banknotes and sight deposits. The SNB thus generates profits on average over the long term. However, against the backdrop of very low yields and high upward pressure on the Swiss franc, it cannot be taken for granted that the SNB will achieve a profit. I will come back to this point in due course.

 

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Macron reforming French elite school École Nationale d’Administration (ENA)

Interesting Proj Synd article by Ngaire Woods

On April 8, French President Emmanuel Macron announced that he will close France’s elite postgraduate school for training public leaders, the École Nationale d’Administration (ENA). Macron, himself an énarque (as graduates are known), says he wants to encourage equal opportunity and national excellence, and respond better to the challenges of COVID-19. But eliminating ENA will likely represent only a negligible step toward this goal. 

Ironically, ENA was established in 1945 by General Charles de Gaulle to break up the French elite and overturn a system of patronage and spoils that had produced a corrupt and inefficient public administration. Admission to the school was thus subject to competitive examination, with those winning places offered a salary for their studies.

Similarly, the United Kingdom’s Northcote-Trevelyan reforms a century earlier – which drew on Sir Charles Trevelyan’s experience rooting out corruption in Britain’s Indian civil service, as well as on the example of imperial China – sought to introduce recruitment by open, competitive examination, and make promotion merit-based. Subsequently, almost all countries – from the United States, Japan, and China to Ghana and Nigeria – have sought to embed meritocracy in their public administration, many by using examinations.

We have a different problem today:

The problem today is that the examination system no longer serves to identify talent and equalize opportunity, but instead has fueled a growing market in expensive private preparatory education that benefits wealthier students. So, whereas 29% of ENA students in the 1950s came from working-class backgrounds, by 2003, it was only 9%.

…..

Britain’s successful COVID-19 vaccine rollout has highlighted the benefits of keeping government in the driver’s seat, bolstered by private-sector leaders willing to help pro bono. This arrangement combines the best of the public sector – people’s trust in institutions that are vaccinating people – with the advantages of a venture-capital approach to assessing risk and allocating resources.

Three weeks after Macron’s announcement, it is now clear that he is not abolishing ENA but rather reducing its annual intake (from 80 students to 40) and renaming it. But the challenge for France is to build a public administration ambitious enough to attract people of purpose and talent, but also open enough to recruit from a much wider cross-section of society. Tinkering with ENA will not achieve this.

RBI trying to improve governance of private banks, but RBI’s own Governing Central Board remains empty

RBI released further norms to improve governance in Private and foreign banks, which is welcome.

However, RBI’s own governance is bit of a problem.

RBI also announced that Mr Ajay Seth, Secretary, Department of Economic Affairs, has been nominated on RBI Central Board as a replacement for Tarun Bajaj.

Curious, one glanced at RBI’s Central Board and saw just 11 of the 21 positions are occupied:

Names and addresses of the Central Board of Directors of the Reserve Bank of India (as seen on 29 Apr 2021)
1.	Shri Shaktikanta Das Governor	@7.	Shri Natarajan Chandrasekaran
2.	Shri Mahesh Kumar Jain Deputy Governor	@8.	Shri Satish Kashinath Marathe
3.	Dr. M. D. Patra Deputy Governor	@9.	Shri Swaminathan Gurumurthy
4.	Shri M. Rajeshwar Rao Deputy Governor	#10.	Shri Debasish Panda
*5.	Ms. Revathy Iyer	#11.	Shri Ajay Seth
*6.	Prof. Sachin Chaturvedi

This number is again closer to the eventful night of 8 November 2016.

One understands it is tough time for these positions to be filled. But these vacancies are known well in advance. AT the time of its annual report in Aug-2020, the Board had 15 members. Since then following have retired from the Board:

• Prasanna Kumar Mohanty
• Dilip S. Shanghvi
• Ashok Gulati
• Manish Sabharwal

RBI informs when a new member is appointed. Likewise, RBI should inform which member’s tenure is over. So that we know this position needs to be filled.

The central bank needs guidance to run the economy in such tough times and needs more helping hands. Instead we see the opposite. Another Deputy Governor (B.P. Kanungo) retired and no appointment was done. Though, the position of the two government nominees on the RBI Board seldom remains vacant..

 

Aligning Interest of Mutual Fund companies with Mutual Fund investors

One of the classic finance books is Where are the Customer’s Yachts?

The title refers to a story about a visitor to New York who admired the yachts of the bankers and brokers. Naively, he asked where all the customers’ yachts were? Of course, none of the customers could afford yachts, even though they dutifully followed the advice of their bankers and brokers. Full of wise contrarian advice and offering a true look at the world of investing, in which brokers get rich while their customers go broke, this book continues to open the eyes of investors to the reality of Wall Street.

SEBI’s recent circular tries to work around the problem by asking MF executives to have skin in the game. SEBI says the key officials in the MF company be paid in the form of units of the scheme!

In order to align the interest of the Key Employees of the AMCs with the unitholders of the mutual fund schemes, it has been decided that a part of compensation of the Key Employees of the AMCs shall be paid in the form of units of the scheme(s), as under:

i. A minimum of 20% of the salary/ perks/ bonus/ non-cash compensation (gross annual CTC) net of income tax and any statutory contributions

(i.e. PF and NPS) of the Key Employees of the AMCs shall be paid in the form of units of Mutual Fund schemes in which they have a role/

oversight.

ii. The compensation paid in the form of units, as mentioned in 2(i), shall be:

a. proportionate to the AUM of the schemes in which the Key Employee has a role/oversight. For this purpose, Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs), Index Funds, Overnight Funds and existing close ended schemes shall be excluded.

b. paid proportionately over 12 months on the date of payment of such salary/ perks/ bonus/ non-cash compensation. In case of compensation paid in the form of employee stock options, the date of exercising such option shall be considered as the date of such payment.

c. locked-in for a minimum period of 3 years or tenure of the scheme whichever is less.

Radhika Gupta, CEO of Edelweiss MF reacts to the circular.

Ideally, a regulator should not intervene in such matters. As MF industry is not really working to correct incentives, regulator comes in the picture.

But again there is no easy way here. It has to be seen whether and how SEBI’s circular is implemented. This new proposal is lot like ESOPs and there have been several problems around ESOPs as well. For all you know, there could be all kinds of unintended consequences.

Ideally, SEBI should have released some research showing whether MF industry is not investing in the interests of the investor. And how this new approach will help.

The Poverty of Macroeconomics — What the Chemical Revolution Tells Us about Neoclassical Production Function

Yi Wen of St Louis Fed in this research:

Quantitative macroeconomics is often portrayed as a science—because of its intensive use of high-powered mathematics—with the possible limitation of being unable to conduct controlled experiments. To qualify as a science, however, theories in that discipline must meet a minimum number of criteria: (i) It has explanatory power to explain phenomena; (ii) it has predictive power to yield quantifiable and falsifiable statements about new phenomenon; and (iii) it has operational power to change the world.

A scientific theory consists of axioms and working hypotheses that facilitate the derivation of contestable statements from the axioms.2 Hence, simply laying out a list of contradictions between a theory’s implications and the data is often insufficient to disqualify a theory as science; it may have just challenged its working hypotheses, not its axioms. But, challenging a theory’s working hypotheses is a crucial step to improve or falsify a theory. This is why Isaac Newton spent so much effort in his Principia Mathematica to deal with the law of motion under air friction.

This article discusses one of the working hypotheses of the Arrow-Debreu paradigm and its dynamic stochastic general equilibrium reincarnation in quantitative macroeconomics—the supply curve and its embodiment in the neoclassical production function. The supply curve is a much stronger pillar than the demand curve in holding up the Arrow-Debreu paradigm, but we argue in this article that the neoclassical production function embodying the supply curve is full of cracks.

More specifically, we show that the neoclassical production function is not quantifiable as a working hypothesis to support the Arrow-Debreu DSGE model, unlike the chemical reaction equations based on Lavoisier’s oxygen theory of combustion. The neoclassical production function relies on the unobservable and unmeasurable Solow residual to explain the quantity of output produced at the firm, industry, or national level, and the hypothetical factors of production (capital and labor) are much like “fire, air, water, and earth” in the ancient Greek theory of the universe. Because the working hypotheses of quantitative macroeconomics are not themselves quantifiable, the neoclassical theory is not yet a science. And this explains the lack of power for DSGE models to predict the 2008 Financial Crisis and the inability of economic theory to change the world by engineering or recreating economic prosperity in developing countries.

Monetizing Privacy

The usual problem cited with digitalisation is loss of individual privacy.

This NY Fed research by Michael Junho Lee and Rodney Garratt turns the problem into an opportunity:

In a market where consumers choose between payment options and firms compete with products and prices, we show that payment data drives the formation of a market monopoly. A data-sharing policy can successfully restore and maintain a competitive market, but often at the expense of both efficiency and consumer welfare. The introduction of a low-cost anonymous means of electronic payment, or digital cash, preserves the market structure and improves consumers’ welfare by enabling them to monetize their private information. We discuss the potential role of central banks in providing digital cash.

 

A Simple Evaluation of Two Decades of Inflation Targeting: Lessons for the New Monetary Policy Strategy

Matthew Famiglietti and Carlos Garriga in this St Louis research evaluates Federal Reserve policy in last two decades:

Under the view of traditional monetarists, inflation is caused by a continuous increase in the supply of money with limited effects in labor markets and unemployment. The view of Keynesians is that inflation is generated in part by the relative strength of the labor market and that prices rise together with some lag caused by higher wages. Under this view, the central bank has the ability to exploit this connection, often referred to as the Phillips Curve, and influence the real economy through the trade-off between inflation and unemployment. Both of these views, in terms of the FOMC’s ability to affect the variables, face some challenges. Recent work by Stock and Watson (2019) decomposes inflation rates into separate components. They find that the FOMC does not have the ability to influence all components of inflation and that many of the more unresponsive factors to monetary policy are weighted prominently in the Fed’s preferred core measure of PCE. Related works by McLeay and Tenreyro (2020), Hazell et al. (2020), and Bharadwaj and Dvorkin (2020) document the flat Phillips phenomena and provide empirical and theoretical reasons for the recent flatness, calling into question the relative trade-off between the Fed’s two measures in its dual mandate. 

So far, the FOMC has done a reasonably good job, in a statistical sense, of keeping unemployment low and prices stable in the era of inflation targeting outside of large recessionary events, including the dot-com bubble, the Great Recession, and the COVID-19 pandemic. To what extent do these empirical distributions and theories about the employment-inflation trade-off matter for the new monetary policy strategy? It could affect the new monetary policy framework as it will seek to shift the bivariate distribution of inflation and unemployment up the y-axis (right panel of figure) to tolerate inflation above the explicit target of 2 percent. The credibility of the target made this a very unlikely outcome in the past, but the new guidance could deliver more inflation outcomes above the current inflation target. To what degree the FOMC can accomplish this remains an open question.

Sachin Bansal led Navi Tecnhnologies foraying into financial services

Sachin Bansal led Navi Tecnhnologies bought Essel MF in 2019 and went through series of approvals.

Now things are sorted and NAVI Mutual Fund has submitted a draft for Nifty index fund.

Sachin has also applied for a banking licence via its acquisition Chaitanya India Fin Credit Private Limited.

Will be interesting to see how both the forays are managed..

Kansas’ experiment with private deposit insurance

Lee Davison and Carlos Ramirez in this FDIC research paper:

Between 1909 and 1922 a private deposit insurance company coexisted with the state-sponsored deposit insurance program in Kansas. This paper documents its development using primary sources. In addition, it examines if affiliation with the private deposit insurance (i) had an effect on risk-taking and the probability of failure; (ii) increased confidence among depositors, and (iii) was influenced by a neighboring bank’s membership in the state’s deposit insurance.

We find that affiliation with the private deposit insurance did not affect a bank’s likelihood of failure, although smaller national bank members did increase risk-taking. The evidence does not support the hypothesis that the company enhanced depositor confidence. Lastly, we do find strong evidence that a bank’s decision to join the private deposit insurance was influenced by neighboring banks’ affiliation with the Kansas deposit insurance program.

RBI’s chicken soup for the economy’s soul

Manas Chakrabarty in this moneycontrol article on the RBI’s State of Economy report published in the Apr-21 Monthly Bulletin.

The RBI’s state of the economy report enlists Benjamin Franklin, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Paulo Coelho, Barack Obama, Shakespeare and a host of lesser luminaries to drive home a message of relentless positivity

…

What exactly is the purpose of this quote fest? Infusing positivity into these dark times, of course. The message is to look beyond the perilous present and transport ourselves into a glorious future. The report’s summing up of the current horror show? ‘This too shall pass.’

Staying with the Struggle: Loving and Laboring in Bombay Cinema

Debashree Mukherjee in this CASI article writes about struggler in Bombay film industry:

If there is one thing historians can agree was fundamental to shaping the Bombay film industry, it is intense precarity. The commercially powerful and globally-recognized film form that we now call “Bollywood” took its first steps at a time when India was under colonial rule, when no financial institution would touch this uncertain new enterprise, and when very few workers were willing to risk their reputations in a field considered taboo. And yet, in the mid-1930s, Bombay became the site of a dynamic film industry, a cine-ecology with roots spreading in many directions. More than 2,000 “talkie” films were made between 1931 and 1945 and at least 40,000 people were formally employed in the film industry on the eve of the Second World War. This is when a new historical figure entered the picture: the struggler.

The word “struggler” means something so specific in Mumbai that it has become a part of urban patois, part of the hybrid lexicon that is called “Bambaiyya.” To struggle in Bombay is to hustle for that elusive “big break” in the movies. The struggler is a very specific social figure, someone who aspires to make a name in the movie business but who has no insider contacts or social connections. In this context, the struggle is both a response to and symptom of the many precarities that continue to mark media industries today.

…..

In my new book, Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City, I pay close attention to the desires of those film fans who chose to remake themselves as film workers. The fan-as-worker embodies cinema’s drive to socially reproduce its own labor force and offers important insights into the organization and operation of media industries across the world. The early film industry in Bombay was acutely undercapitalized and raising finance for filmmaking was a daily hustle. The struggler’s historical appearance at this moment is enabled by this financial hustle. Many of Bombay’s most famous film producers balanced their financial risks off the contingency of numerous wage workers, stunt artists, light boys, and extras—all forgotten today. The struggler’s dreams of film fame allowed a labor surplus to flood the city, creating a continual turnover of expendable bodies that helped build a beloved and resilient cinema industry.

 

Making waves – Fed spillovers are stronger and more encompassing than the ECB spillovers

Markets know that Fed policy matters more than any other global central bank. In some countries. Fed policy would matter more even compared to their own central bank policy.

Michele Ca’ Zorzi, Luca Dedola, Georgios Georgiadis, Marek Jarociński, Livio Stracca and Georg Strasser in this ECB research:

This article argues that European Central Bank (ECB) and Federal Reserve System (Fed) monetary policy spill over to other countries asymmetrically. At the bilateral level, the Fed’s impact on the euro area is material to firms’ financial conditions and economic activity. Conversely, the impact of the ECB’s actions on the US economy is minimal. On a global scale, both central banks’ monetary policies matter for other countries, but the Fed’s monetary policy has a more sizeable impact, particularly on foreign financial variables, such as corporate bond spreads.

 

From master masons to information architects: how standards can transform reporting

Superb speech by Gareth Ramsay of Bank of England. He points how open standards help whether one looks at designing cathedrals or data systems:

 I want to begin by talking about cathedrals.

The great cathedrals of Europe were built in the Middle Ages by teams of skilled stone masons.

To get the dimensions of the building right, it is said that each team would use measures based around the body of the master mason: his foot, his stride, his arm, and so on. And so a local standard was born.

Those standards were designed with one specific use in mind – the construction of that cathedral. And very useful they were, too. But they were closed systems – the foot and the yard used to build one cathedral were different from those used to build another. And this was not just an English peculiarity: across the channel, a foot length in Strasbourg was 295 mm, a foot in Paris was 325 mm, but a foot in Bordeaux was a relative whopper at 344 mm.

Of course people came to understand the great benefits of enforcing universal, common standards. In part for maintaining the cathedrals themselves, so that new, replacement stones could be sourced that would fit snugly between their neighbours. But the benefits of universal measurement standards could be applied a long way beyond the niche discipline of cathedral building.

Now some of you may think that today’s financial system is not perfectly comparable to the glorious gothic cathedrals of the Middle Ages.

But like those cathedrals, many of the data systems underpinning today’s financial firms and markets were built with narrow reference to their own needs, by their own master masons – their CIOs and systems architects. They too were closed systems. Each needed to be able to record, track and manipulate its data. Its data points needed to fit snugly alongside each other. But the design of each system often paid little attention – understandably – to any broader public good. In this speech, I want to talk about whether there are wider public benefits that might flow from standardising these data labels, and set out a way forward to reap those benefits collectively.

So let me turn from mediaeval architecture to data.

 

Economist as a Tailor: Creativity in the art of sewing, crafting and recycling

Jeemol Unni, Professor of Economics at Ahmedabad University dons the hat of a tailor with aplomb.

Sewing is a hobby I cultivated when I was a child, later as an adolescent and continued as an adult till the present! If sewing is being creative and creativity is in the genes, then I am sure it came to me from the maternal side of my family. My grandmother and my mother enjoyed sewing and taught me various tricks of the trade even as a child. Both of them had sewing machines. My grandmothers’ was what one sees in tailor shops in India, set on a table, with a pedal at floor level. The manual sewing machine was operated by running the pedal with the feet. Grandma would encourage me to run it and stitch in straight lines on old cloth even when I was a child. She taught me the etiquette of sewing, even how to hold a needle. You point the needle towards yourself when stitching by hand! She, my mother and the teacher in school taught me various kinds of embroidery stitches. However, my interest was more in sewing with a machine.

My mother had a manual sewing machine run by hand which she converted into a motor run machine. She made all my frocks and skirts and more for my cousins as well. She taught me to cut and sew dresses, how to cut the neck, the sleeves, and how to stitch it. Some of the gems she taught me was how to cut the cloth used to hem or stich the neckline. Strips of cloth are cut diagonally to allow for greater stretch while stitching the neckline. I have had a hand-run sewing machine for ages, with a handle that you spin to run the machine. Never converted it to a motor run one as I use it not-so-frequently given my full time profession as an Economist. 

 

Growth, coal and carbon emissions: economic overheating and climate change

Emanuel Kohlscheen, Richhild Moessner and Előd Takáts in this BIS research:

We use a comprehensive database of 121 countries over the 1971-2016 period to study how macroeconomic factors drive carbon (carbon-dioxide) emissions. For this purpose, dynamic panel regressions are estimated. Carbon emissions rise with economic development, manufacturing activity, urbanization and increasingly with economic growth. In electricity generation, the use of coal, and to a lesser degree of oil, is associated with higher carbon emissions, while renewable energy use is already associated with lower national emissions in advanced economies. We also uncover a non-linearity: economic overheating is particularly harmful when coal use is more intensive. The results suggest that mitigating economic cycles might also reduce carbon emissions.

The findings are policy relevant. Our linear models results provide broad support for structural policies aimed at greening the energy mix. They clearly highlight the very negative role of coal, and to a lesser extent of oil – and the positive impact of renewable energy sources. Here,
our new finding that the sensitivity of carbon emissions to growth is increasing seems particularly relevant. Our non-linear results are particularly relevant for cyclical economic policies. In particular, central banks might find it relevant that economic stabilisation, which is within most central bank mandates, could also mitigate carbon emissions, and thereby lessen the risks of climate change. 

25 years of National Stock Exchnage’s NIFTY Index

NSE’s NIFTY came into being on 22 April 1996. The index completes 25 years of existence:x

India’s flagship equity index Nifty50 completed 25 years of its journey on April 22. The equity barometer came into existence on April 22, 1996, and since then has seen many changes in its components, indicating the changing business-economic dynamics of the country.

Nifty has come a long way after it was launched in April 1996, when it traded at 1,107, with the base year of November 1995 set as 1,000. For the first time in history, Nifty closed above the psychological mark of 15,000 on February 8, 2021.

Nifty50 is a benchmark equity index and it shows the weighted average of India’s top 50 companies, across sectors, that are listed on NSE. With time, many components of the index exit the group while the new ones enter.

Over the years, the sectoral representation of the Nifty has also changed tremendously and remains in consonance with the changes in the underlying economy.

“With a change in the economy from manufacturing to services over the past three decades and the rise of the private sector, the sectoral representation in 2021 is vastly different from that of 1996,” said brokerage firm Motilal Oswal.

Of the 50 stocks in the Nifty, 13 companies – HDFC Bank, RIL, HDFC, ITC, HUL, L&T, SBI, Tata Motors, Dr Reddy’s Labs, Tata Steel, Grasim, Hero, and Hindalco – have been a part of the index’s journey since inception.

The combined market cap of these 13 companies has grown at a CAGR of 18 percent between April 1996 and February 2021, said the brokerage firm, said a report from brokerage firm Motilal Oswal Financial Services.

The average P/E multiple of the Nifty between April 1996 and February 2021 stands at 15.7 times; however, the average for the last 10 years is 18.8 times, said the brokerage firm.

Motilal Oswal highlighted while traversing its journey from 1,107 to 15,000, the Nifty (up about 14 times) has delivered 11.1 percent CAGR returns in the last 25 years.

Monetary Policy, Equity Markets and the Information Effect

Calvin He of RBA in this paper analyse the impact of information on equity markets:

Central banks analyse copious amounts of information to assess the economic outlook to then set monetary policy. So, could changes in monetary policy reveal some additional information about the economic outlook to the public? This channel is known as the ‘information effect’. The information effect posits that, in addition to the usual effects of monetary policy, agents interpret an interest rate increase as signalling some additional positive economic information. This effect, if strong enough, could then lead to dynamics where an increase in interest rates causes an expansion in economic activity.

I evaluate whether the information effect can be detected in Australia through the lens of equity markets. I find that, contrary to the predictions of the information effect, a surprise monetary tightening from a monetary policy announcement causes equity prices to fall. I also show that this response in equity prices is, at least in part, driven by downward adjustments in expected earnings growth. These responses are consistent with conventional views of the effects of monetary policy.

However, looking beyond monetary policy announcements yields some evidence that an information effect could be present through other forms of Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) communication. I find speeches delivered by the RBA Governor generate responses in equity prices and earnings forecasts consistent with the information effect. But this result appears to be the exception rather than the rule. For most monetary policy communication, at least in equity markets, the information effect is not an important channel of monetary policy.

 

What Three Economists Taught Us About Currency Regimes

Prof Jeffrey Frankel in this Project Syndicate Article pays tribute to the three economists who passed away recently:

Today, freely floating exchange rates suit most large countries better than the late economists Richard Cooper, Robert Mundell, and John Williamson thought. But some countries do well with firmly fixed exchange rates, while at least half of the world’s countries fall in between.

Rest in Peace: M Narasimham was the doyen of banking reforms in India

My tribute to Shri M Narasimham. I look at the famous song from the bank Police “Every breath you take”:

The impact of the Narasimham Committee reports continues to weigh on the Indian banking system. It is fair to say that most developments in the Indian banking have some foundation in the Narasimham reports. One can visualise Narasimham perched on his heavenly abode singing this song by The Police to the RBI and every banker: “…Every move you make, Every bond you break, Every step you take, I’ll be watching you!”

In the same piece I also pay tribute to economist John Williamson who also passed away recently.

I paid tribute to Prof Robert Mundell yesterday.

What times. Oh God have some mercy!

Aggregate implications of barriers to female entrepreneurship in India

Gaurav Chiplunkar and Pinelopi Goldberg in this voxeu research:

Promoting gender equality in firm ownership is not only beneficial for women, but for the entire economy. This column describes a framework for quantifying the macroeconomic implications of gender-based distortions that affect female entrepreneurship. Applying the model to India suggests that eliminating the barriers to entry, operation, and expansion for female-owned firms could produce significant productivity and welfare gains.