Articles by Nirvikar Singh

This paper investigates whether the seemingly discretionary and flexible approach of the Reserve Bank of India can in practice be described by a Taylor-type rule. It estimates an exchange-rate-augmented Taylor rule for India over the period Quarter 1 of 1980 to Quarter 4 of 2008. It investigates monetary policy changes between the pre- and post-liberalisation periods in order to capture the potential impact of macroeconomic structural changes on the rbi's monetary policy conduct. Overall, it finds that the output gap seems to matter more to rbi than inflation, there is greater sensitivity to consumer price inflation, exchange rate changes do not constitute an important policy factor, and the post-1998 conduct of monetary policy seems to have changed in the direction of less inertia.

Exchange Rates, Deficits and Capital Flows T N SRINIVASAN, NIRVIKAR SINGH Lal, Bery and Pant (2005, hereafter LBP) assert that

India's federal system is distinguished by tax and expenditure assignments that result in large vertical fiscal imbalances, and consequent transfers from the central government to the state governments. Several channels are used for these transfers: the Finance Commission, the Planning Commission, and central government ministries. This article uses panel data on centre-state transfers to examine how the economic and political importance of states influences the level and composition of per capita transfers, as well as differences in temporal patterns of Planning Commission and Finance Commission transfers. We find evidence that states with indications of greater bargaining power seem to receive larger per capita transfers, and that there is greater temporal variation in Planning Commission transfers.

We discuss the relationship of our initial paper [Singh, Bhandari, Chen and Khare 2003] to the work of Deaton and Dreze (2002).