Through a glass darkly: Deciphering the impact of oil price shocks

In order to examine if the impact of oil price shocks depends on the structure of an economy, a vertical (VSC) and a horizontal (HSC) long-run supply curve identification are successively imposed on a three variable VAR with Indian time series data. While core inflation is measured with the VSC, the HSC requires a new concept of demand-driven inflation: Residual (demand) inflation, which gives the impact of short and medium run demand shocks on inflation. Core and residual inflation are both estimated. The data favors the HSC, but both identifications imply that policy demand squeeze aggravated international oil price shocks.Oil Shocks, VAR, Identification strategies, Developing economy, Residual Inflation

Through a Glass Darkly - Deciphering the Impact of Oil Price Shocks

In order to examine if the impact of oil price shocks depends on the structure of an economy, a vertical (VSC) and a horizontal (HSC) long-run supply curve identification are successively imposed on a three variable VAR with Indian time series data. While core inflation is measured with the VSC, the HSC requires a new concept of demand-driven inflation : Residual (demand) inflation, which gives the impact of short and medium run demand shocks on inflation. Core and residual inflation are both estimated. The data favors the HSC, but both identifications imply that policy demand squeeze aggravated international oil price shocks.Oil shocks, VAR, Identification strategies, Developing economy, Residual Inflation

Tackling Daughter Deficits in Tamil Nadu, India

A well-known demographic feature in several East and South Asian countries is the continuing decline in the proportion of girls to boys. In India, till recently, the skewed sex ratio was treated as a Northern and Western Indian phenomenon. However, analysis of the 2001 Census shows that some of the districts with the most unbalanced sex ratios lie in the Southern state of Tamil Nadu. Notwithstanding its recent addition to the list of states exhibiting daughter deficit, the state has pioneered initiatives to prevent daughter elimination and to measure daughter deficit. The availability of district-level panel data on infant mortality and sex ratio at birth covering the years 1996-1999 and 2003, periods which may be characterized by sharp differences in programs and initiatives to reduce daughter elimination combined with spatial variation in these programs, provides an unusual opportunity to identify the causal effect of interventions on both, pre- and post-birth daughter deficit. We find evidence of daughter deficit in at least half the state’s districts with a majority of the deficit (60 to 70 percent) occurring before birth, potentially due to sex selective abortion as compared to after birth due to female infanticide and neglect. The temporal analysis over the period 1996-1999 and 2003, shows a 46 percent decline in post-birth deficit, without a corresponding increase in pre-birth deficit. Our difference-in-differences estimates suggest that at least 79 percent of the decline in post-birth deficit may be attributed to the set of policy interventions pursued by the state and civil society actors.

Disconnected Diagrams in Lattice Qcd

In this work, we present state-of-the-art numerical methods and their applications for computing a particular class of observables using lattice quantum chromodynamics (Lattice QCD), a discretized version of the fundamental theory of quarks and gluons. These observables require calculating so called disconnected diagrams and are important for understanding many aspects of hadron structure, such as the strange content of the proton. We begin by introducing the reader to the key concepts of Lattice QCD and rigorously define the meaning of disconnected diagrams through an example of the Wick contractions of the nucleon. Subsequently, the calculation of observables requiring disconnected diagrams is posed as the computationally challenging problem of finding the trace of the inverse of an incredibly large, sparse matrix. This is followed by a brief primer of numerical sparse matrix techniques that overviews broadly used methods in Lattice QCD and builds the background for the novel algorithm presented in this work. We then introduce singular value deflation as a method to improve convergence of trace estimation and analyze its effects on matrices from a variety of fields, including chemical transport modeling, magnetohydrodynamics, and QCD. Finally, we apply this method to compute observables such as the strange axial charge of the proton and strange sigma terms in light nuclei. The work in this thesis is innovative for four reasons. First, we analyze the effects of deflation with a model that makes qualitative predictions about its effectiveness, taking only the singular value spectrum as input, and compare deflated variance with different types of trace estimator noise. Second, the synergy between probing methods and deflation is investigated both experimentally and theoretically. Third, we use the synergistic combination of deflation and a graph coloring algorithm known as hierarchical probing to conduct a lattice calculation of light disconnected matrix elements of the nucleon at two different values of the lattice spacing. Finally, we employ these algorithms to do a high-precision study of strange sigma terms in light nuclei; to our knowledge this is the first calculation of its kind from Lattice QCD

Rainfall Variability Analysis of Jodhpur Tehsil, Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India

Rainfall in India shows remarkable temporal and spatial variations. This characteristic affects the ground water levels and water levels of surface water bodies as well. This paper attempts to map and analyse the rainfall patterns of 30 years for Jodhpur tehsil by calculating the rainfall deviation with an intent to understand the impact on water logging and availability of water in the region