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

Reconfigurable High Performance Secured NoC Design Using Hierarchical Agent-based Monitoring System

With the rapid increase in demand for high performance computing, there is also a significant growth of data communication that leads to leverage the significance of network on chip. This paper proposes a reconfigurable fault tolerant on chip architecture with hierarchical agent based monitoring system for enhancing the performance of network based multiprocessor system on chip against faulty links and nodes. These distributed agents provide healthy status and congestion information of the network. This status information is used for further packet routing in the network with the help of XY routing algorithm. The functionality of Agent is enhanced not only to work as information provider but also to take decision for packet to either pass or stop to the processing element by setting the firewall in order to provide security. Proposed design provides a better performance and area optimization by avoiding deadlock and live lock as compared to existing approaches over network design