Job Market Paper: Revisiting the Nehru-Mahalanobis Industrial Policy: India's State-Led Heavy Industry Drive, Link

Abstract: Influenced by Soviet industrialization and the post-World War II emphasis on state-led development, India sought to shift production towards capital goods sectors. To what extent did the Nehru-Mahalanobis focus on heavy industries during India's Second Five-Year Plan (1956-61) foster their growth? To answer this question, I compile a unique dataset tracking large-scale industries from 1951-1965, roughly spanning the first three Five-Year Plans. This dataset harmonizes industrial production, prices, and input-output data from pre-digital data books.  Previous studies showed positive effects, but my analysis, which adjusts for an industrial classification change using detailed annual data, does not find a statistically significant impact of the policy on the development of targeted heavy industries. I discuss this episode within the context of development theory from the 1950s and 1960s. I find no learning-by-doing effects emanating from this heavy industry push to targeted industries, highlighting the importance of the quality of state intervention. Weak production linkages between targeted and non-targeted sectors restricted spillover opportunities for broader industrial development.

Diagonalizability of Singular Matrices: Some Theory and An Application to Input-Output Tables (co-authored with Deepankar Basu) 

Link to the latest version; Version, July 2022

Abstract: Recent developments in the theory of production networks offer interesting applications and revival of input-output analysis. Some recent papers have studied the propagation of a temporary, negative shock through an input-output network. Such analyses of shock propagation rely on the eigendecomposition of relevant input-output matrices. Only diagonalizable matrices can be eigendecomposed. In this paper, we provide necessary and sufficient conditions for diagonalizability of any singular matrix using its rank and eigenvalues. We apply our results to 5 historical (Germany, India and Japan) and 670 contemporary IO matrices (15 annual IO matrices for 43 countries from the 2016 release of the World Input-Output Database and 25 annual IO matrices for the U.S. economy) and find that some IO matrices are not diagonalizable.

Changing rules of the game of global finance: Glimpses from Argentina's sovereign debt restructuring in The Political Economy of International Finance in an Age of Inequality: Soft Currencies, Hard Landings, edited by Gerald Epstein, Edward Elgar, November 2018

The "odious" route to a sovereign debt crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo in Elgar Encyclopedia of Financial Crises, edited by Sara Hsu, Edward Elgar, December 2023