Miscellaneous

This note highlights the need for active and deep debt capital markets, both fixed income and derivative markets in India.

This note assesses the state of the Indian banking system including its small overall size and high concentration risk, poor indicators of financial inclusion and depth, opaque balance sheets, weak profitability, and highly covariant strategies followed by government-owned banks.

The principal goal of this conference series is to create a platform to discuss issues of significant importance to the future of the Indian financial system that interested researchers in India as well as elsewhere can start to explore and present solutions for.

Mr N Vaghul, chairman emeritus of ICICI Bank, recently delivered the Talwar Memorial Lecture on the topic “The Future of Finance in India”.

In this paper, we present two stylized models of the financial system. We make the case that in order to realize the potential of a well-functioning complete financial market, financial system designers and financial service providers will need to think about ways to deliver financial propositions that are customized to individual households by responding to their unique circumstances.

Indian economic policy emphasises achieving high growth rates coupled with ensuring that the poor are able to participate in the market economy. This inclusion agenda has that many implications for the field of finance.

The IFMR Trust is interested in finding practical solutions to challenges faced in the delivery of services across the areas in which it is involved.

Microcredit has spread extremely rapidly since its beginnings in the late 1970s, but whether and how much it helps the poor is the subject of intense debate. This paper reports on the first randomized evaluation of the impact of introducing microcredit in a new market. Half of 104 slums in Hyderabad, India were randomly selected for opening of an MFI branch while the remainder were not.