Author: Dvara Research

Gold dominates household portfolios in India. This has been labelled as irrational behaviour by financially illiterate households. In this paper, we show that household preference towards gold is not irrational in the context of the Indian financial and macroeconomic environment which includes high inflation, financial repression, and capital controls.

The social protection landscape in India is transforming at rapid speed owing to the digitization of the various systems that are involved in the process flow of social protection delivery.

Identifying the Market Failure and Mis-identifying the Intervention The discussion paper highlights a ‘market failure’ in the debt market for MSMEs wherein incumbent banks are unwilling to lend to MSMEs, who are otherwise creditworthy, due to lack of documentation and thereby leading to suboptimal outcomes for both banks and MSMEs[3]. Adding to these frictions is […]

In our response, we question the assumptions put forth by the discussion paper for the creation of DBs and the concomitant licensing and regulatory regime.

Complex financial instruments and products can help consumers to meet their precise financial needs even if they are opaque in their design details due to the underlying mathematical principles. Regulators need to understand that restricting complexity in design is not in the best interests of the consumer.

In this post, we Introduce the Dvara-Haqdarshak Study on Exclusion in Government to Person Payments.

Blog post series: This series of posts will attempt to do two things – first, to examine the definitional boundaries of social protection and where they relate to other financial services for low-income households, and second, to use this to arrive at a working definition of social protection for policymakers and research organisations such as Dvara Research. As a first step, we break down a few questions in this first post.

Offering affordable derivative products that will help them hedge against price and weather risks is vital

Bad Banks are typically Government sponsored Asset Reconstruction Companies (ARCs) setup with the primary objective of cleaning up bank balance sheets. Unlike private ARCs, the Bad Banks are setup as a one-time measure with the primary objective of reducing the build-up of Non-Performing Assets (NPAs) post a financial or economic crisis.

In this policy brief, we compare the design and historical experience of Bad Banks in other jurisdictions with the newly setup NARCL across dimensions relating to legal character, government control, objectives, funding sources, resolution process and level of haircuts.