Only Twice As Much: A Rule for Regulating Lenders

Present-day policies aiming to improve the performance of credit markets, such as group-lending or creation of collateral, typically aim to change incentives for borrowers. In contrast, pre-modern credit market interventions, such as usury laws, often targeted the behavior of lenders. We describe and model a norm which, though widespread, has escaped scholarly attention: a stipulation that accumulated interest cannot exceed the original principal, irrespective of how much time has elapsed. We interpret this rule, which is found in Hindu, Roman, and Chinese legal traditions, as giving lenders the incentive to find more capable borrowers, who will be able to repay early, thereby improving the allocation of capital. We document the consistency between our explanation and the rationale offered by policy-makers.Rural Credit Markets, Information Acquisition, Predatory Lending

Commitment and Conquest: The Case of British Rule in India

Contemporary historians usually attribute the East India Company's military success in India to its military strength, and to the mutual distrust of Indian regimes. We argue these explanations, though correct, are incomplete. The credibility of the Company's commitments, even though imperfect, was essential to its success.War, Colonialism, India

Commitment and Conquest: The Case of British Rule in India

Contemporary historians usually attribute the East India Company's military success in India to its military strength. In contrast, we argue that, on its own, military strength was a mixed blessing: it could have led to the formation of coalitions against the Company. This did not happen because the Company's commitments to Indian regimes were more credible than their commitments to each other. In this sense, commitment was the key to conquest.

Only Twice As Much: A Rule for Regulating Lenders

Present-day policies aiming to improve the performance of credit markets, such as group-lending or creation of collateral, typically aim to change incentives for borrowers. In contrast, pre-modern credit market interventions, such as usury laws, often targeted the behavior of lenders. We describe and model a norm which, though widespread, has escaped scholarly attention: a stipulation that accumulated interest cannot exceed the original principal, irrespective of how much time has elapsed. We interpret this rule, which is found in Hindu, Roman, and Chinese legal traditions, as giving lenders the incentive to find more capable borrowers, who will be able to repay early, thereby improving the allocation of capital. We document the consistency between our explanation and the rationale offered by policy-makers.Rural Credit Markets, Information Acquisition, Predatory Lending

Taxation by Auction: Fund-Raising by 19th Century Indian Guilds

We describe a unique institution used by 19th century Indian guilds to raise funds: The guild members agreed that on a particular day all but one of their shops would be shut. An auction would be held to determine which one shop would remain open, and the winning bid would go to the guild funds. We compare this “taxation by auction” mechanism with more conventional tax schemes and show that under certain conditions, not only will a majority of the guild members prefer to be taxed via an auction, but that this form of taxation will be more equitable than other forms.Auctions, Fund-Raising, Indian Guilds, Taxation

Unfree Labour : did indenture reduce labour supply to tea plantations in Assam?

Migration to tea plantations in Assam in the 19th century used indentured contracts. These contracts differed by conditions of harshness. Migration under the Special Act gained notoriety by giving tea planter the right of private arrest. Using a new set of migration by types of contract, the paper assesses if harsh terms of indenture discouraged labour flows. We find that regions using the harsh contract saw lower response to rise in the price of tea. Disaggregating by types of recruiter, we find that the response to market recruitment was high in all regions, but response to recruitment using community networks is statistically insignificant, suggesting that informational asymmetries may be an explanation for continuing migration despite concerns raised by the nationalist movement, social reformers and policy makers

Contracts, Hold-Up, and Exports: Textiles and Opium in Colonial India

Trade and export, it is argued, spur economic growth. This paper studies the microeconomics of exporting. We build a heuristic model of transactions between exporters and producers and relate it to East India Company operations in colonial Bengal. Our model and the historical record stress two difficulties: the exporter and its agents might not uphold pricing agreements, and producers might not honor sales contracts. The model shows when procurement succeeds or fails, highlighting the tension between these two hold-up problems. We analyze several cases including the East India Company's textile venture, the famous Opium Monopoly, and present-day contract farming.

Contracts, Hold-Up, and Exports: Textiles and Opium in Colonial India

Trade and export, it is argued, spur economic growth. This paper studies the microeconomics of exporting. We build a heuristic model of transactions between exporters and producers and relate it to East India Company operations in colonial Bengal. Our model and the historical record stress two difficulties: the exporter and its agents might not uphold pricing agreements, and producers might not honor sales contracts. The model shows when procurement succeeds or fails, highlighting the tension between these two hold-up problems. We analyze several cases including the East India Company's textile venture, the famous Opium Monopoly, and present-day contract farming.

Gender and Corruption

Using several independent data sets, we investigate the relationship between gender and corruption. We show using micro data that women are less involved in bribery, and are less likely to condone bribe taking. Cross-country data show that corruption is less severe where women hold a larger share of parliamentary seats and senior positions in the government bureaucracy, and comprise a larger share of the labor force.Corruption; Gender; Public policy

Design and implementation of secured agent based NoC using shortest path routing algorithm

Network on chip (NoC) is a scalable interconnection architecture for every increasing communication demand between many processing cores in system on chip design. Reliability aspects are becoming an important issue in fault tolerant architecture. Hence there is a demand for fault tolerant Agent architecture with suitable routing algorithm which plays a vital role in order to enhance the NoC performance. The proposed fault tolerant Agent based NoC method is used to enhance the reliability and performance of the Multiprocessor System on Chip (MPSoC) design against faulty links and nodes. These agents are placed in hierarchical manner to collect, process, classify and distribute different fault information related to the faulty links and nodes of the network. This fault information is used for further packet routing in the network with the help of shortest path routing algorithm. In addition to this the agent will provide the security for the node by setting firewall, which then decides whether the packet has to be processed or not. This intern provides high performance, low latency NoC by avoiding deadlock and live lock with low area overhead