Our seventh and final scholar in the series is Ammu Lavanya, a PhD candidate in Economics at George Washington University. Her research is in the areas of International Finance, Monetary Economics, Empirical Banking and Financial History.

We spoke about her job market paper titled International Financial Flows, Credit Allocation and Productivity. We talked about financial liberalization in India, the 2004 banking reform that increased the ceiling on raising foreign equity its impact on market value, lending capacity and increasing productivity through credit in India, the difference between private versus state owned banks, and much more.

Recorded October 9th, 2025.

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Timestamps

(00:00:00) - Intro

(00:03:06) - Understanding Capital Inflows and Financial Liberalization

(00:04:36) - Concerns Around Foreign Capital and Hot Money Flows

(00:07:12) - The Banking Reform and Ownership Landscape in India

(00:12:10) - Banks Most Affected and Patterns of Foreign Investment

(00:17:05) - Impact on Borrowing Capacity and Lending Behavior

(00:19:38) - Productive Lending and Screening Mechanisms

(00:25:53) - Managerial Practices and Governance Improvements

(00:34:20) - Firm-Level Effects and Data Construction

(00:39:50) - Aggregate Effects and Decline in Misallocation

(00:45:19) - Implications for Policy and the Future of Liberalization

(00:48:42) - Differences Between Public and Private Banks

(00:53:15) - Outro

Our sixth scholar in the series is Nayantara Biswas is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. She received her Ph.D. in economics from Clark University. Her research focuses on health equity impact evaluations of small-scale interventions and large-scale public policies.

We spoke about dissertation titled, The Impact of Social Policies on Reproductive Health, Maternal Employment, and Child Health: Evidence from India. We talked about demand side versus supply side policy interventions in public health, India's maternal health policy landscape, the ASHA workers program, variation across states in policy impact and much more.

Recorded August 28th, 2025.

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Timestamps

(00:00:00) - Intro

(00:01:35) - Setting the Stage

(00:04:44) - India's Maternal–Child Health Policy Landscape

(00:08:29) - Uneven Progress: State Differences, Culture, and Measurement Challenges

(00:09:24) - Who Are the ASHA Workers?

(00:11:56) - Trust, Access, and the Information Channel

(00:14:26) - Pay, Hours, and Unionization: Why Conditions Vary by State

(00:16:50) - How Incentives Are Structured

(00:21:44) - From Design to Data: Building the District-Level Panel

(00:25:20) - We Are Measuring ASHAs—and Something Else

(00:26:45) - DiD Simplified: How the Causal Claim Works

(00:33:45) - Policy Implications: Where to Invest and How to Train

(00:36:53) - Cost-Effectiveness: Supply vs. Demand

(00:39:53) - Why Supply-Side Effects Take Time

(00:41:50) - Beyond Pregnancy: Anganwadi Daycare and Women's Work

(00:46:27) - Outro

Our fifth scholar in the series is Karthik Narayan, who is a doctoral candidate in Economics at Nuffield College and at the Department of Economics, University of Oxford. His research focuses on monetary policy, macroeconomics and finance in developing countries.

We spoke about his job market paper titled, Macroeconomic Effects of Scheduled and Unscheduled Monetary Policy Surprises.

We talked about how the Reserve Bank of India makes and announces its policies, its impact on interest rates, inflation expectations and output, measuring the impact of policy announcements, the Lucas Critique and much more.

Recorded August 28th, 2025.

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Timestamps

(00:00:00) - Intro

(00:03:22) - Measuring Causality Is Hard

(00:11:16) - What Counts as a Policy Surprise?

(00:13:27) - OIS and MIBOR: Expectation Thermometers

(00:21:11) - Short term versus long term effects on asset prices

(00:27:18) - Noise and Fiscal-Monetary Coordination

(00:32:46) - Inflation Before and After the MPC

(00:37:24) - The Lucas Critique

(00:40:51) - Practical Implications

(00:45:48) - Other Research Interests

(00:47:39) - Outro