XKDR Newsletter - Issue 13
Short selling • Innovation by startups • Python notebook for Nighttime Lights data • Growth of service exports • ESG Investing • Performance of Airports • Building capable Indian firms • Join us
The place of short selling in the financial markets
K. P. Krishnan, Renuka Sane, Ajay Shah, Anjali Sharma, Harsh Vardhan, and Bhargavi Zaveri-Shah, write about the role of short-seller activism in the Indian financial markets. In their article, they argue about its benefits in improving market quality, the limited role of financial regulations to address market failure, and the extent to which firm managers should be required to monitor information about their firms.
Read the full article here.
Are startups engaging in innovation in India?
Using two measures, patent fillings, and Income Tax exemptions, as proxies to measure innovation, Aneesha Chitgupi, Karthik Suresh and Diya Uday ask whether India's policies are incentivizing innovation by startups. They find that startups are not driving ‘innovation’ in the conventional sense of the term in India and highlight the need for a re-look at the current policy on startups in India.
Read the full article here.
Exploring economic activity from outer space: A Python notebook for processing and analyzing satellite nighttime lights
Nighttime lights (NTL) data offers great advantages over traditional economic indicators such as GDP. But its use has been limited. In a new paper, Carlos Mendez and Ayush Patnaik contribute to this domain, by presenting a user-friendly geocomputational notebook that illustrates how to process and analyze satellite NTL images.
Read the full paper here.
Commentary
In his column in the Business Standard, Ajay Shah writes about the role of growing service exports in India. He urges the government and private players to harness this trend and think deeper about improving goods export.
Charmi Mehta and Susan Thomas have an article titled - Regulatory Mandates on ESG Investing Fall Short of Ensuring Impact - on BQ Prime. They discuss the slow growth of ESG investments in India in light of the recent SEBI framework on the subject.
Indian airports are still ranking behind on several metrics of performance, specifically on human capacity management. In their article - Improving Incentives for Airport Managers in India, Ajay Shah and Karthik Suresh highlight the importance of releasing daily statistics by airports to passengers, in order to improve Indian airports on global parameters.
Ajay Shah writes about the need to roll back the relics of Indian socialism to build capable Indian firms. He argues that the policymakers must re-think several restrictions imposed on Indian firms and individuals (round-tripping laws, SEBI minimum float rule etc.) if we are to succeed in the game of globalisation.
Media
Following the slew of banking crises across Europe and the US, Charmi Mehta hosts Dr. Harsh Vardhan to discuss the importance of the pecking order in debt repayment.
Ajay Shah and Mohit Satynanand joined Amit Varma in Episode 323 of The Seen and the Unseen to discuss the problems of bank resolution in India in light of the SVB failure.
Ajay Shah and Apar Gupta were interviewed by Prashanth Perumal on the Hindu Parley podcast. Click here to watch their discussion on creating adequate regulatory checks and balances to deal with the growing technological landscape such as AI.
Events
Book talk: We hosted Subashish Bhadra on 21st April 2023, who gave us a talk on his recently released book - ‘Caged Tiger: How Too Much Government is Holding Indians Back’.
The book throws light on the current design of the institutions in the country. It urges us to think about why Indian institutions work the way that they do and how can we do better.
Capacity building session: On 29th April 2023, we hosted two capacity building sessions on research, policy analysis and planning at the Yashwant Rao Chavan Academy of Development Administration (YASHADA), Pune, for government officials in the Directorate of Town Planning and Valuation in Maharashtra. This was part of a larger capacity building program organised by the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS).
Public Seminar: Nupoor Singh, Senior Editor at Springer Nature will give a talk on Publishing Ethically: It is not a tight rope! at the XKDR Forum office on 10th May 2023. The talk will cover publishing ethics, what pitfalls scholars should watch out for, how malpractices are detected, and what are the ways forward. Click here to register.
We are hiring!
We are looking for quantitative and policy researchers in the fields of legal systems, public procurement, households & finance, firms & finance, climate change, and statistics & computer science.
We welcome your comments and suggestions on our work. Please write them to pavithra.manivannan4@gmail.com. To know more about our work and to collaborate with us visit xkdr.org.