Prof. Kartik Ganju received his doctorate in Business Administration from the Fox School of Business at Temple University. He has a Masters degree in Operational Research from the London School of Economics and a Bachelor's degree in Statistics from Delhi University. His research examines the impact of IT on healthcare and societal issues. Specifically, the impact of IT on billing practices of hospitals, the propensity of physicians to leave hospitals (and even the practice of medicine) once IT systems are adopted in hospitals and the effect that the adoption of these systems by a hospital has on neighbouring hospitals and impacts on racial disparities in the delivery of healthcare. His research has also examined the effect that IT has beyond effects on GDP and productivity and the effect that the adoption of IT systems have on the well-being of citizens.

Priyanka is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Responsible Business. In her current role, she works in collaboration with Aston Business School, UK, and Kedge Business School, France, on sustainability which involves understanding the mental frames of practitioners to determine various aspects of sustainability. She completed her PhD in Sociology from IIT Kanpur, with specialisation in CSR activities. As a part of her doctoral work, she undertook extensive fieldwork to get an insight into various perspectives of CSR interventions. She holds a bachelor’s in Economics from the Delhi University and masters in Development Studies from Gautam Buddha University.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) has evolved as an interdisciplinary concept, cross-cutting into fields of management, economics, law, sociology, and also social work. In India, with the introduction of Section 135 of the Companies Act 2013, expenditure on socially responsible activities has been made mandatory. This evolution and journey of CSR from a philanthropic activity to a mandatory multi-stakeholder concept is one full of debates and conflict.  The talk aims to give an overview of the CSR landscape in India and present field experiences of some of the CSR activities that are undertaken by foundations managed by corporate entities. 

Dr. Ranjana Gupta is a senior lecturer in taxation at Auckland University of Technology (AUT), and her experience includes research and tax consulting to an accounting firm in Auckland besides teaching a range of taxation courses to undergraduate and postgraduate students. Ranjana holds a Ph.D. in Commerce and a Master’s degree majoring in taxation. She regularly presents research papers at national and international tax and accounting conferences and publishes refereed journal articles both in New Zealand and internationally. She regularly reviews papers for various leading tax journals, including the publication, “Managing Your Business, Taxation, and Legal Compliance,” published by Financial and Business Advisor. Since 2007, she has authored chapters in taxation publications by Thomson Reuters (Income, Income of Individuals, Other Income, Deductions, and Companies) and CCH Wolters Kluwer NZ CCH (income from personal services: employees and the self-employed). She confidently accepts higher challenges in her academic and professional career and is passionate about sharing her knowledge.

Dr. Breuer is the Senior Resident Representative for India, Nepal and Bhutan. Before this assignment, he was division chief of the ASEAN 4 division at the Asia and Pacific Department of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which includes Indonesia and Philippines, and the IMF mission chief to both countries. In the IMF, Mr. Breuer has worked on a number of other countries, including Colombia, Korea, Thailand, led program negotiating missions to Honduras, Nicaragua, Peru, and Bolivia, and was central banking advisor in Bolivia. Before joining the IMF, Mr. Breuer held a number of policy and academic positions, including Member of the Board of Directors at the Central Bank of Paraguay, where his responsibilities included supervising monetary operations and international reserve management, advisor to the Ministers of Finance of Bolivia and Paraguay, visiting assistant professor of economics at the University of Illinois, and advisor to Executive Director of the IMF. He holds a PhD in economics from the University of Illinois at Urban-Champaign.

(in collaboration with LSE's Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and Environment). 

The purpose of the event was to identify the key elements for policy and research collaboration on the role of finance in managing the climate transition with justice. It seeks to move beyond the current agenda of ‘green finance’ to identify financial policies, mechanisms and practices that can build an inclusive, net zero and resilient economy. 

The IMF’s Fiscal Monitor provides a toolkit for climate mitigation policies. It discusses the pros and cons of alterative mitigation instruments including carbon taxes, trading systems, regulations, and tax-subsidy schemes. A quantitative analysis is provided for G20 countries illustrating the impacts of carbon pricing, what prices are consistent with countries’ Paris mitigation pledges, and the trade-offs with other policy instruments. The design and impacts of a carbon price floor arrangement among large emitters that could complement the Paris Agreement are considered. The report also discusses strategies for enhancing the acceptability of mitigation policies and supporting measures needed to ensure adequate investment in low-emission technologies. 

This talk will discuss the way that the chemistry of air pollution shapes the policy and political challenges of improving air quality. It will lay out a general framework for the intersection of science and social dynamics and offer some specific proposals for air quality governance in India.

Vishal Misra is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Columbia University, with a joint appointment in the Electrical Engineering Department and also a visiting scientist at Google. He is an ACM and IEEE Fellow and his research emphasis is on mathematical modeling of systems,  bridging the gap between practice and analysis. He is also credited with inventing live-microblogging at CricInfo, a company he co-founded  while a graduate student at UMass Amherst, predating Twitter by 10 years. He also played an active part in the Net Neutrality regulation process in India, where his definition of Net Neutrality was both adopted both by the citizen's movement as well is consistent with the regulations eventually passed. He has been awarded a Distinguished Alumnus Award by IIT Bombay (2019) and a  Distinguished Young Alumnus Award by UMass Amherst College of Engineering (2014).

The issue of Network Neutrality has ignited considerable public debatein the recent past. While the term and much of the discussion originated in the legal community, we started looking at it from an engineering and networking perspective a few years ago. We employed the lens of cooperative game theory and careful modeling of the Internet including the topology, peering relationships, and protocols used on the Internet. Our primary conclusion is that Network Neutrality should be expressed in terms of how you treat competition, not in how you treat packets and we proposed a definition of Network Neutrality that expresses that.  We present some of our results including our prediction back in 2008 of a rise in paid peering (last year Netflix signed paid peering arrangements with all 4 of the top broadband providers in the US), the negative impact of differential pricing on competition, the inadequacies of the Network Neutrality regulation in the US and the recent regulations in India and Canada, where they are consistent with our definition of Network Neutrality.

Rohini Pande, the Henry J. Heinz II Professor of Economics at Yale and Director of Yale’s Economic Growth Center, is an economist whose research examines the economic costs and benefits of informal and formal institutions in the developing world and the role of public policy in effecting change.

Giorgia Barboni is an Assistant Professor of Finance at the University of Warwick, Warwick Business School. Her research interests are in Development Finance, Behavioral Economics and Household Finance. Giorgia's work focuses on innovations in financial contracts and their impact on business growth and households’ financial decisions.

Formal Finance, Poverty and Mental Health: Experimental Evidence from India

We report on a nine-year long-run large-scale randomized controlled trial that evaluates the impact of Kshetriya Grameen Financial Services (KGFS), an Indian financial institution that offers rural poor a suite of financial products -- micro-credit, micro-savings and micro-insurance -- paired with financial advising. In three rural districts of Tamil Nadu, KGFS randomized choice of service area, creating 50 treatment and 50 control areas. Together, this covered 876 villages. This paper provides a set of core results based on household surveys covering a sample of 4,160 households.

Our paper shows that the arrival of a formal financial institution like KGFS in rural Tamil Nadu leads to a significant impact on poverty reduction, with income consistently improving across the entire household distribution in treated service areas. Moreover, the gains deriving from increased formal indebtedness do not come at the cost of additional mental pressure: treated women report improved decision-making as well as subjective well-being, while also showing a significant reduction in their levels of stress.

Dr. Chandan Jha is an Assistant Professor in the Madden School of Business at Le Moyne College. His research interests lie in the areas of development economics, political economy, and finance and development. His current research focuses primarily on the issues of gender inequality and corruption, and he has published several articles on these issues in several reputed journals such as the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, the Journal of Population Economics, and International Review of Economics and Finance. He holds a Ph.D. from Louisiana State University and an M.A. in economics from Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics.

Corruption and Stock Price Volatility: Firm-Level Evidence

This paper assesses the effects of corruption on firm-level equity price volatility using a sample of over 3,000 firms from 31 countries around the world over the period of 2003–2014. We find that corruption, constructed using the responses from the World Bank Enterprise Survey to match the firm’s size, industry, location, and country, is positively associated with equity price volatility. We further find that equity price volatility decreases with the asset size in the presence of corruption, indicating that smaller firms are disproportionately affected by corruption. We also find evidence of a positive association between corruption measured at the country level and stock price volatility, however, the effect of country-level corruption is found to be worse for firms with larger asset sizes.

Alex M. Thomas teaches economics at Azim Premji University, Bengaluru, India. He received his economics education from the universities of Madras, Hyderabad, and Sydney. He has published in both national and international journals such as Artha Vijnana, Economic & Political Weekly, History of Economic Ideas, History of Economics Review, and Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics. His co-edited book with Ajit Sinha, Pluralistic Economics and its History (Routledge India, 2019), has just been published. He is currently writing an introductory macroeconomics textbook. 

G V Nadhanael is an Assistant Adviser in RBI and currently on deputation with University of British Columbia (UBC) under the Golden Jubilee Fellowship for Higher Studies Abroad (First recipient in RBI for Ph.D). At the RBI, he was a member of the core team which developed the macroeconomic framework for inflation targeting. He was also a member of other technical committees including Technical Group for Working Group on Savings during the Twelfth Five-Year Plan and for the Urjit Patel Committee on Monetary Policy Framework. He has won number of prestigious awards including Governor’s gold medal at the RBI and David Dodge Fellowship for academic excellence at UBC. He has published works on growth-inflation trade-off, wage-price dynamics, financial inclusion and monetary policy. His current research interest is on understanding inflation process in India; both micro-foundations and policy implications.

Nikhil Patel is an economist at the Bank for International Settlements. His main areas of interest are macroeconomics, international economics and monetary policy. He holds a PhD in economics from Columbia University, an Ms in Quantitative Economics from the Indian Statistical Institute, and a BSc. in Physics from Delhi University.

The real effective exchange rate (REER) is one of the most cited statistical constructs in open-economy macroeconomics. We show that the models used to compute these numbers are not rich enough to allow for the rising importance of global value chains. Moreover, because different sectors within a country participate in international production sharing at different stages, sector level variations are also important for determining competitiveness. Incorporating these features, we develop a framework to compute REER at both the sector and country level and apply it on inter-country input-output tables to study the properties of the new measures of REER.

Kaliya Young is a 2019 India-U.S. Fellow at New America. Young is one of the world’s leading experts on decentralized or self-sovereign identity technology. She is the author of A Comprehensive Guide to Self-Sovereign Identity and currently holds the position of adjunct professor at Merritt College where she is developing a curriculum about identity. For the last 15 years, she has worked within the industry to catalyze the formation of a new layer of the internet designed to serve individuals. She began sketching out distributed social networks in 2003 and co-founded the Internet Identity Workshop in 2005 with Doc Searls and Phil Windley. More details can be found here: https://www.newamerica.org/our-people/kaliya-young/ She is also known as Identity Woman: https://www.identitywoman.net 

In this seminar Kaliya Young will share two significant pieces of her work firstly the Domains of Identity that provides a clear picture of all the different domains individual's data ends up in databases. This can serve as the basis of a dialogue about the proper relationship between different domains. Secondly she has been at the heart of a community developing new Decentralized Identity Technology standards and will share more about them and how they can enable a many-to-many exchange of verifiable credentials between individuals and the institutions they interact with.