I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Economics at the Pennsylvania State University, and I am on the job market for the 2022-23 academic year.
I am interested in exploring questions at the intersection of Development Economics and Macroeconomics. Currently, my research focuses on quantifying the impact of government regulations on firms in developing countries, using both reduced form and structural methods. Prior to my Ph.D., I completed my Master's degree in Economics from the Delhi School of Economics and my bachelor's degree in Economics from Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi.
For more details, please see my CV or contact me at kxp338@psu.edu.
Job Market Paper
Small by Choice? Reassessing the Aggregate Implications of Size-Based Regulations
Link to Paper
Abstract: Firms with employment exceeding a threshold level are more regulated than smaller firms in many countries. Current work gauges such rules' impact based on whether firms bunch at the threshold, with more bunching taken to imply higher regulatory costs. In this paper, I show that size-based rules can be highly restrictive for firms even with no bunching. I argue using India's employment protection legislation (EPL) that applies to manufacturing plants with 100+ full-time workers. Although plants do not bunch at 100 workers, I show that EPL restricts employment growth of plants by lowering their transitions from below to above the regulatory threshold. Plants near the threshold also substitute towards contract workers and capital, on which EPL does not apply. To quantify aggregate implications, I develop and estimate a structural dynamic heterogeneous firm model with multiple factors of production and labor search costs. Counterfactuals suggest that removing EPL would make more firms enter and hire full-time workers faster, raising full-time employment and output by 9% and 4% in the long run.
Research in Progress
No Country for Dying Firms: Evidence from India
(joint with S. Chatterjee , K. Krishna, Y. Zhao)
Abstract: Firms in India exit at a much lower rate than firms in the US and other developing countries. Additionally, in India, exit rates are much lower in the manufacturing sector than in the services sector. In this paper, we argue that Indian institutions create frictions to firm exit and adjustment in the manufacturing sector. We present several facts that show how manufacturing firms respond to these frictions. We then develop and estimate a dynamic heterogeneous firm model with entry, exit and input (labor and capital) adjustment costs. This allows us to pin down the magnitudes of exit and adjustment costs and their implications for firm development and aggregate manufacturing total factor productivity.