Articles by Lekha S Chakraborty

This paper presents new evidence on the links between public infrastructure provisioning and time allocation related to the water sector in India. Using time-use data, the analysis reveals that worsening public infrastructure affects market work with evident gender differentials. The results also suggest that the access to public infrastructure can lead to substitution effects in time allocation between unpaid work and market work. The broad conclusion is that public investment policy can redress intra-household inequalities in terms of labour supply decisions by supporting initiatives that reduce the allocation of time in non-market work.

This paper examines whether in the financially deregulated regime, shift in the financing pattern of the fiscal deficit away from seigniorage and external debt financing to bond financing has the probability of creating an upward pressure on the rate of interest in India. Using an asymmetric vector autoregressive model, we found that in the deregulated financial regime, the fiscal deficit did not create a rise in the interest rate. Rather, the causality runs from the exante real rate of interest to fiscal deficit. This result is in conformity with the recent trend in Indian public finance where the high interest rate fuelled the accumulation of more debt through increase in interest payments and the consequent debt-deficit spiral.