Talk by Thomas Laubach on inflation expectations, inflation targeting, monetary policy

Thomas Laubach will do a talk titled Inflation: Expectations, Targets and the Institutional Framework for Monetary Policy at the NIPFP auditorium at 3:30 PM on December 9 (Friday). He is Professor at Goethe University in Germany. All are welcome.

Two seminars

Seminars by Sanjay Banerji (today) and Tarun Ramadorai (Thursday).

Contagion in international financial markets

A seminar by Tarun Ramadorai, 29 September.

Inflation targeting: What have we learned

Inflation targeting: What have we learned, a seminar by Spencer Dale, Chief Economist of the Bank of England, at NIPFP, 16 June.

Opportunities in the Macro/Finance Group at NIPFP

The Macro/Finance Group at NIPFP has opportunities in several roles.

Economists

We require individuals with a Ph.D. in economics or finance, with an interest in original research in our fields. These would be contractual appointments for a period of one or two years. One or more publications in international journals would be helpful, as would be the ability to carry research from inception all the way to publication.

Policy research associates

We require people who can participate in large complex research projects in the field of public policy. As you will see at the URL above, the Macro/Finance Group at NIPFP is offers many opportunities for a meaningful engagement with government in the ground realities of India's economic reform.

Policy work is highly inter-disciplinary. The policy group at NIPFP draws together people with a knowledge of public economics, public administration, financial regulation and law. We welcome interest in these positions by people with strong capabilities in one or two of these areas, and curiosity about the others. The ideal candidates would have read the Percy Mistry and Raghuram Rajan reports, and have familiarity with the things being talked about in this blog.

Quantitative research associates

We require individuals with a Masters degree in economics, finance, public policy or statistics. The work involves participating in academic research projects in the fields of macroeconomics and finance, and practical macroeconomic policy analysis. Desirable features include: domain knowledge; knowledge of computer programming, ideally in R; experience with CMIE databases and datastream.

Research programmers

We require a senior person who would play a dual role. On one hand, he would be responsible for an existing system which includes linux desktops, linux servers, and a project management system based on redmine and svn. This is expected to take up roughly 20% of effort. The prime focus will be participating in development work of complex analysis of economic and financial data. This development work is primarily in R. It includes building internal tools and also some packages released as open source.

We also require a junior person who will primarily work on systems administration for an existing system which includes linux desktops, linux servers and a project management system which uses redmine and svn. Some Microsoft windows knowledge is also required. On a second priority, there would be development in R.

The Macro/Finance group at NIPFP is a research environment: non-hierarchical, low political complexity, high IQ people, high intensity and involvement. Such work could be particularly appropriate for a person who is at present a computer engineer but desires knowledge of economics and finance.

Administrator

We require an experienced program manager who would be able to handle budgets, financial reporting, deadlines and deliverables, and client interactions. Experience with government procedure would be a positive.

Generic features

The Macro/Finance Group at NIPFP is a conducive research environment including a modern office. Compensation is generally superior to that seen in government academic institutions. The policy and the quantitative teams are strongly interconnected with significant spillovers of knowledge.

If any of these interest you, please contact Anurodh Sharma (anurodh54 at gmail.com) with your resume by 31 May 2011, where you clearly identify which of these roles is of interest to you.

Structural change in the stylised facts in transition

Has India Emerged? Business Cycle Facts from a Transitioning Economy by Chetan Ghate, Radhika Pandey, and Ila Patnaik.

Did the Indian capital controls work as a tool of macroeconomic policy?

A new working paper has been released: Did the Indian capital controls work as a tool of macroeconomic policy?

The abstract of this paper reads: In 2010 and 2011, there has been a fresh wave of interest in capital controls. India is one of the few large countries with a complex system of capital controls, and hence offers an opportunity to assess the extent to which these help achieve goals of macroeconomic and financial policy. We find that the capital controls were associated with poor governance, were unable to sustain the erstwhile exchange rate regime, and did not support financial stability. India's experience is thus inconsistent with the revisionist view of capital controls. Macroeconomic policy in India has moved away from the erstwhile strategies, towards greater exchange rate flexibility combined with capital account liberalisation.

Our stock of papers is here.

8th conference of NIPFP-DEA Research Program

The Program is up on the website. The full set of papers and slideshows will trickle in within a day or three.

How to measure inflation in India

Ila Patnaik, Giovanni Veronese and I have a paper titled How to Measure Inflation in India?. The abstract reads:

What is the best inflation measure in India? What inflation measure is most relevant for monetary policy making in India? Questions of timeliness, weights in the price index, accuracy of food price measurement, and inclusion of services prices are relevant to the choice of measure. We show that under present conditions of measurement, the Consumer Price Index for Industrial Workers (CPI-IW) is preferable to either the Wholesale Price Index or the GDP deflator.

You may like to see our stock of papers.

Inflation measurement in India may just get significantly better, with the release of the new CPI. The paper should help in evaluating this new CPI and in evaluating its applications.

Research meeting on DSGE

link

Three new papers

The first is an entry titled India which is forthcoming in Elseviers Encyclopaedia of Financial Globalisation, edited by Gerard Caprio. It's our attempt at a bird's eye view of what is known, and not known, about India's financial globalisation.

The second is a treatment of exchange rates and monetary policy and inflation. There are two well understood phenomena: the `exchange rate passthrough' (or how prices in India go up when the rupee depreciates) and the `monetary policy transmission' (or how prices in India go down when RBI raises rates). This paper views these two in a unified fashion. The main finding is that the channel through which monetary tightening influences domestic prices is mainly through the consequent exchange rate appreciation.

The third is about explaining the process of firms becoming multinationals. The conventional story told (the Helpman-Melitz-Yeaple model) is one where firms self-select themselves to become MNCs, where more efficient firms export and the most efficient firms become MNCs. This story is well suited for manufacturing, where costs of transportation are important, where it's efficient for an Indian firm to make widgets in the UK so as to avoid the costs of transportation of shipping to the UK. But this story does not help us think about services which are `weightless'. We think we have a story which helps us understand MNCs in services, and when we go test this with data for Indian software companies, it seems to work. Our approach yields the opposite prediction: that less productive software companies are
more likely to become MNCs.

Our stock of papers is at: http://macrofinance.nipfp.org.in/papers.html.