Saibal Kar

Saibal Kar
Institute of Labor Economics

MSc, PhD

About

196
Publications
43,790
Reads
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1,743
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Introduction
Saibal Kar is the Reserve Bank of India Chair Professor of Economics at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta and Institute of Labor Economics, Bonn. Saibal's research interest covers International Economics and Labor Economics. He is the Director, Eastern Regional Centre of ICSSR in Kolkata. He teaches M.Sc. field courses in International Trade and Labor Economics at the Department of Economics, Calcutta University.
Additional affiliations
May 2017 - October 2024
Centre for Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta
Position
  • Reserve Bank of India Chair Professor of Economics
July 2016 - May 2017
University of Calcutta
Position
  • Professor (Full)
March 2003 - March 2004
Centre for Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta
Position
  • RBI Research Officer
Education
August 1998 - August 2002
Northern Illinois University
Field of study
  • Labor Economics, Public Economics

Publications

Publications (196)
Article
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Over fifty percent of the population in Tanzania suffers from multidimensional poverty. Because of the high rate of poverty and slow improvements, ending poverty by the year 2030 remains an empirically testable proposition and part of a shared challenge. The main purpose of this study is to predict multidimensional poverty status with the help of b...
Chapter
In the aftermath of COVID-19 and war on Ukraine, most countries around the world are suffering from high inflation and unemployment. The rise in the price of consumables affect all, but workers with market-determined wages suffer more than those who benefit from institutional wage bargaining. Workers outside union coverage expect fall in both nomin...
Chapter
How does trade in intermediate commodities affect the emission levels in South Asian countries? The prevailing literature has engaged with production fragmentation and trade in intermediate goods for a long time; yet the environmental impact of trade in intermediates is less understood. This paper deals with a panel of eight South Asian countries p...
Article
India experienced one of the strictest lockdowns during COVID-19 and sections of the workforce seemed overwhelmingly disadvantaged. Since considerable poverty still prevails, daily wages and gender disparity in income are disproportionately exposed to economic shocks in India. Employing World Bank data for rural areas in six states of India, we inv...
Article
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Research has shown that the relationship between economic freedom and corruption is rather complex. While some studies suggest a negative relationship, others show the matter to be more nuanced. While more regulations are known to foster corrupt institutions, a competitive market can also incentivize bribery and corruption. Our study examines the r...
Preprint
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Occupational prestige or job status may induce people to remain unemployed even when jobs are available. Family wealth tends to increase the opportunity cost of job search and more so in a world where job status is a social phenomenon. The paper shows that measured involuntary unemployment may a have a voluntary component. Greater physical supply o...
Chapter
The labor market in India is a complex coexistence of formal, regular employment and unorganized, and broadly informal and irregular job market activities. The labor market policies in India were largely governed by the Industrial Disputes Act of 1947 and the Factories Act of 1948, until the revised set of regulation were brought into force in 2017...
Article
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Beneficial influence of female representation in implementing environment-friendly policies have been documented in recent studies. However, presence of factors such as corruption and bureaucratic red tapes, known to hinder development initiatives, raises question about whether women legislators can achieve the desired level of success with environ...
Article
How does out-migration of skilled workers affect unskilled workers’ wage in the source country? When skilled workers emigrate, unskilled wages tend to go down in some countries. If the sector that uses both skilled and unskilled workers shows a lower degree of capital intensity as compared to sectors that use only skilled workers in production, it...
Article
Purpose According to the Government of India’s Ministry of Labour and Employment Report (2015), almost 90% of the Indian workforce can still be categorized as informally employed, generating approximately 50% of the national product. Challenges with data availability have made a rigorous analysis of the informal economy in India often difficult and...
Chapter
It is well-known that school enrolment and retention of female students in most countries of South Asia are abysmally poor. While some recent improvements have been made possible via direct transfers to attract female students in school, the factors that can make participation natural and widespread remain elusive. This paper tries to link school e...
Article
The implementation of minimum wage is a complex matter for most developing countries; the degree of adoption and compliance is subjected to various conditions. The presence of large informal sector as the mainstay of semi-skilled and unskilled workers raises relevant questions on how adoption of minimum wage in the formal sector should affect job o...
Article
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Understanding sources of financial crisis and policies to lessen its impacts is a natural candidate for Nobel Prize, as has been the case for the award in 2022. Decades of breakthrough research by Ben Bernanke, Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig have independently and in a consorted way led us to a much better understanding of the causes and consequ...
Chapter
Participation in multilateral and multi-country pollution abatement treaties is often a contentious matter owing to the gaps between domestic and international gains associated with it. We show that the welfare implications of cross-country carbon trade could vary considerably across participating and non-participating countries and that it is a fu...
Article
This paper examines the impact of a rise in oil prices on the wages of workers in the unorganized sector of a developing economy. The model economy comprises of two non-traded transport sectors, formal and informal, along with other sectors. The main results that we obtain are as follows. The non-formal transport sector contracts when fuel price ri...
Preprint
Full-text available
Occupational prestige or job status may induce people to remain unemployed even when jobs are available. Thus measured unemployment will always have a voluntary component. Accumulated wealth in a family tends to increase the opportunity cost of job search, more so in a world where job status is socially important. Thus prosperity and unemployment m...
Article
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Based on studies where institutions augment financial development by guarantying property rights, reducing information asymmetry and bargaining power, our results show that countries that adopt and enhance women's rights experience greater financial development. Employing alternate identification strategies, we find that a standard deviation rise i...
Article
Utilising the third round of World Bank Survey data collected during September 2020, the employment shocks in rural India are analysed based on the gender, age, caste, and income quartile of individuals. Using graphical representations and simple mean tests, it is found that, on average, females in rural areas did not have an occupation relative to...
Preprint
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Lockdown in India affected the employment of casual workers in India adversely. Within such group, women workers faced lower probability of retaining jobs. The results were based on a detailed survey data published by the World Bank in 2021.
Article
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Production reorganization at the firm level as an outcome of environmental mandates is rarely studied in the literature. This paper shows that when exposed to abatement policy to address environmental pollution, a large number of firms from pollution-intensive industries in India outsource production as abatement cost rises. Static and dynamic pane...
Article
Transboundary pollution often affects natural resources in downstream countries. The harmful impact of upstream pollution on agricultural land use has been scantily studied. This paper models transboundary pollution and argues that in the presence of international trade between contiguous countries the polluter may find it incentive-compatible to a...
Article
The rate at which interstellar habitable planets are being discovered would naturally warrant consideration and exploration of a number of related issues. While the physical conditions that can support persistent contact demand structural similarity of an extra-solar planet (exoplanet) to Earth, and the necessary bio-chemical conditions needed to s...
Article
((Link to Full-text)): <<<<<<<https://rdcu.be/ckl8j>>>>>>>> ----------------copy and paste in the browser ------------- Abstract: Self-employment among immigrants is a key source for income and social assimilation with natives. Rate of self-employment is significantly higher for immigrants than for native-born individuals, and the causal reasons be...
Article
Given the fast growth of on-demand transportation services and ride-sharing platforms, the concept of private vehicle ownership is rapidly declining. Although there are multiple fully-grown ride-sharing systems, they are proprietary and centrally controlled. Facilitating ride-sharing using a localized distributed coordination between the riders and...
Article
Developing countries often suffer from high corruption, high income inequality and poor institutional arrangements that give rise to large shadow economies. Earlier evidence shows that shadow economies moderate the negative effects of corruption on income inequality in highly unequal South American countries. For Asia, we show that the persistence...
Article
Several strands of the static and dynamic theoretical constructs and the empirical applications in the subject of economics owe substantially to the well-known principles of physical sciences. The present article explores as to how the development of the popular gravity models in international trade can be traced back to Newton’s law of gravitation...
Article
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It is well-known that ranking of journals, whether in science, technology, engineering or in social sciences, such as in economics, is a contentious issue. For many subjects, there is no correct ranking, but a universe of rankings, each a result of subjective decisions made by the developers. The subjective element in journal rankings not only comp...
Article
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Conversion of land from agricultural to industrial use has met with strong opposition in many developing countries in recent times. A number of relevant papers study welfare effects associated with willful conversion, no conversion or politically forced and manipulated conversion of land into other activities. No study, however, deals with the evol...
Article
Rent seeking within the vast informal segment of the developing world is a relatively under‐explored topic in the interface of labor market policies and public economics. Moreover, how rent seeking and corruption within the informal segment gets affected by economic reforms targeted for the formal sector is rarely discussed in the literature. This...
Chapter
Full-text available
For a long time, labor migration to the rich countries in the world is dominated by exodus of workers from the developing source countries. Early on, this gave rise to the famous debate about brain drain. The skilled professionals from the ‘third world’ tend to leave their origin in search of a better life in rich and advanced economies. The gap in...
Article
While average juvenile crime rates across India has dropped in recent decades, juvenile property crime rates (total juvenile crimes divided by state population) has actually gone up from 15% in 2000-01 to about 20% in 2013-14. There is huge variation across states when it comes to juvenile crime rates. The literature on juvenile crime in the Indian...
Article
Increase in trade has asymmetric impact on emigration by skill types for a developing country. Cost of migration is a dynamic function of the type of emigration and it determines a complementary relation between emigration of skilled workers and expansion of trade. Emigration of unskilled workers is a substitute, however, and these outcomes coexist...
Chapter
Introduction A well-known and well-accepted policy of the government is to tax the rich and provide welfare benefits to the poor who cannot sustain minimum acceptable standards of living consistent with human and social dignity. Although such a practice is in vogue in all countries in the world, the quality and quantity of intervention varies widel...
Presentation
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Application and insights of ML techniques in Economic and Financial models.
Article
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Outsourcing as a form of production reorganisation has important implications for factor productivity. Empirical verification of this relationship for India, however, is unavailable in the recent times. To fill this gap, we measure the relationship between outsourcing and multifactor productivity for Indian firms between 2010 and 2014. We use fixed...
Article
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This exploratory paper analyses, theoretically with some numerical examples, the relationship between tax evasion and provision of public goods. In this model, we incorporate tax evasion leading to a fall in the supply of public goods. We investigate the relation between provision of public goods and wages of workers engaged in the production of pu...
Book
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General equilibrium model of international trade has profoundly impacted various sub-disciplines of economics such as development economics, public economics, and environmental economics, among many others. These models continue to inspire younger generations of researchers and are used as essential tools for evaluation of policies. It began with t...
Article
Measurement of the dynamic elasticity of resource allocation in cloud computing continues to be a relevant problem in the related literature. Yet, there is scant evidence on determining the dynamic scaling quotient in such operations. Elasticity is defined as the ability to adapt to the changing workloads by provisioning and de-provisioning of Clou...
Article
Predicting returns in the stock market is usually posed as a forecasting problem where prices are predicted. Intrinsic volatility in the stock market across the globe makes the task of prediction challenging. Consequently, forecasting and diffusion modeling undermines a diverse range of problems encountered in predicting trends in the stock market....
Preprint
Full-text available
A recent independent study resulted in a ranking system which ranked Astronomy and Computing (ASCOM) much higher than most of the older journals highlighting its niche prominence. We investigate the notable ascendancy in reputation of ASCOM by proposing a novel differential equation based modeling. The modeling is a consequence of knowledge discove...
Preprint
Full-text available
A recent independent study resulted in a ranking system which ranked Astronomy and Computing (ASCOM) much higher than most of the older journals highlighting its niche prominence. We investigate the notable ascendancy in reputation of ASCOM by proposing a novel differential equation based modeling. The modeling is a consequence of knowledge discove...
Presentation
Full-text available
A Few Ideas on Applicable Mathematics and Computing in Econometrics and Finance. Revenue Forecasting in Technological Services: Evidence from Large Data Centers SES-RREF: The Machine Learning Approach to Credible Metrics of Scholastic Evidence via Recursive Referencing ALVEC: Allocation by Lotka Volterra Elastic Cloud: A QoS aware Non Linear Dynami...
Article
This paper contributes to the inadequately explored empirical literature on tourism for Indian States. It investigates how the rule of law influences federal budgetary allocation for tourism at the state level. Theoretically speaking, the impact of rule of law on budget allocation for the states can be positive or negative, if the prevailing rule o...
Article
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Data centre is a facility, which houses computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems. Due to the emergence of data centre-based computing services, it has become necessary to examine how the costs associated with data centres evolve over time, mainly in view of efficiency issues. We have presented a qua...
Article
Can corruption affect the relationship between human capital and FDI for a host country? This paper explores the interactive impact of corruption and human capital on FDI. In particular, we investigate whether countries with higher or lower corruption levels benefit differently in terms of FDI inflow following an equal improvement in the level of h...
Article
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Citation network analysis of scholarly articles and journals has already been explored in-depth and the subtlety of the differences between citations and references has also been recognized. Despite this recognition, citation network is mainly used for judging the contribution of an author or a journal for the scientific community. Analyzing citati...
Article
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This paper deals with illegal immigration via two distinct activities—smuggling and trafficking of workers. A destination–source model determines economic pay-offs and a standard labor market policy works as a deterrent. Tax paid by legal unskilled workers at the destination is determined endogenously and it finances inland monitoring against illeg...
Article
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The phased elimination of Multi Fibre Arrangements (MFA) for textile and apparel has been one of the most compelling trade policy reforms that removed a system of bilateral quotas. The reform brought in significant changes in the industrial structures for exporters from the south, including India. Has the labour-intensive high-employment textile an...
Research
https://www.ideasforindia.in/topics/governance/juvenile-delinquency-and-income-disparity-across-indian-states.html
Article
This paper measures the ‘emission intensity’ of the fifteen organized manufacturing and agricultural sectors in India. Our primary objective and contribution in this paper are in obtaining a direct relation between technological adoption (greater capitalization) and emission intensity at the industry level over a period of fourteen years between 19...
Article
Full-text available
Religious and ethnic minorities often face partisan treatment with regard to provision of public goods. This may be due to discriminatory practices or historical antecedents, like caste divides in India. We measure access to public goods in eleven districts of West Bengal in India where rural concentration of religious minorities, namely Muslims is...
Article
Full-text available
Enterprises are investing heavily in cloud data centers to meet the ever surging business demand. Data Center is a facility, which houses computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems. It generally includes power supply equipment, communication connections and cooling equipment. A large data center can u...
Preprint
Full-text available
Enterprises are investing heavily in cloud data centers to meet the ever surging business demand. Data Center is a facility, which houses computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems. It generally includes power supply equipment, communication connections and cooling equipment. A large data center can u...
Article
It is well-known in the empirical literature that present-oriented individuals are less likely to go to college as compared to forward looking individuals. There is compelling evidence of a high percentage of dropouts from high schools in poor countries. The endogenous sorting of homogeneous workers into skilled and unskilled types might be the out...
Article
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The evidence is mixed on whether informal labor in developing countries benefits from trade and labor market reforms. Reforms lead to higher wages and improved employment conditions in the informal sector in some cases, and to the opposite effect in others. At a cross-country level, lifting trade protection boosts informal-sector employment. The di...
Chapter
Studies on illegal labor migration to rich countries are strongly policy driven and welfare-centric. Border control and employer interdiction are the most popular policies for controlling illegal entries. We review a large body of literature on illegal immigration in general and smuggling and trafficking of workers in particular. A policy to lower...
Article
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Many countries in the developed world are ageing in terms of their distribution of population. Conversely, a number of countries in the south have younger population. India for example, has 60% of its population in the age group of 15-59, with the mean age close to 27 years as of present times. The lower share of population in the higher and lower...
Article
Available evidence, though limited to the organized sector only, suggests that FDI flowing in with MNE activities or direct FIIs generate technological and market access spillovers for firms outside the core group in destination countries. We investigate the organizational link between formal and informal sectors in India and argue that the spread...
Chapter
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Recent spurt of activism in relation to the enactment of bye-laws by the majority of Gram Panchayats (GPs) of West Bengal for imposing different fees, rates and tolls on services provided to the villagers no doubt, has brought the opportunity for the GPs, particularly those urbanized in nature to raise own resources. This study analyzed four differ...
Chapter
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This chapter is an introduction to the readings in labor economics and industrial organization that the academics and practitioners should find interesting and relevant. As the title of the book suggests, the introductory chapter makes a conscious effort to select a number of topics in the interface of the two subject areas with deep connection to...
Chapter
This chapter makes a deeper investigation into the interactions between the industry and labor with various facets of the market structures and industrial labor. We consider the well-known duopolistic models, the wage bargaining frameworks, the wage competition, short-run and long-run general equilibrium effects of reforms, and the possibility of l...
Chapter
The present chapter provides a detailed account of the labor market characteristics from developing and transition countries, with special emphasis on a number of current policies that have been adopted in India. One such policy, that this chapter models and discusses in considerable detail, is the employment guarantee scheme, which appears to be t...
Chapter
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Asymmetric information in the labor market arises mainly from the lack of access and interpretability of information in isolated labor markets. It is suggested that the problem of asymmetric information is quite compelling if the workers are either new in the labor market so that no employer has information regarding their productivity, or because...
Chapter
The large literature on risk sharing and rent sharing between employers and employees in the industrial sector of a country consistently argues that unless such interactions are factored in, the wage–employment variations across industries cannot be adequately explained in light of available evidence. This chapter reviews the concerned literature,...
Chapter
The classical and neoclassical economic theory posits the existence of a homogeneous labor market for the entire economy. If the labor market is unified, labor in one industry can shift to another industry. In such homogeneous labor markets, the total labor demand and total labor supply determine the economy-wide wage rate. It is possible to revise...
Article
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One of the well-known barriers to development is persistence of disadvantage among communities. The lack of occupational and therefore upward social mobility continues to restrain households from achieving socially desirable outcomes. This paper studies the effect of short-term internal migration experience on the intergenerational persistence of i...
Chapter
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The international trade in goods and services is dominated by multi-market firms. A firm's decision to sell in the domestic market vis-à-vis the foreign market depends on a number of factors including transport costs, price uncertainties and the barriers to trade. We study the effect of a reduction in non-tariff barriers or quotas on the optimal de...
Article
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Evidence from some OECD countries suggests that skilled immigrants are over-represented in entrepreneurship. We offer an analytical explanation to show that it may be a direct outcome of asymmetric information between immigrants and potential employers in the rich countries. Limiting occupational choices to self-employment and employment, we show t...
Chapter
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This chapter looks into regional specialization in service trade within India, but of a specific variety — namely, the trade in health services of which medical tourism is an important component. The subject of regional trade arises from two sources. First, the demand for health tourism catered to by India arises from certain regional blocs. Althou...
Article
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This paper looks at the broader implications of labor market related reforms beyond the conventional partial equilibrium response, which typically deals with the employment effects in the formal sector. In recent times, this is an important issue for India where such reforms are being seriously contemplated. The issue is important in view of the fa...
Article
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The paper empirically investigates whether developing countries may use trade policy as an alternative to environmental policies in order to control carbon emission. It measures the effectiveness of the existing ‘Most Favored Nations’ (MFN) tariff rates applicable to lower-middle income countries and for countries sorted on the basis of manufacturi...
Chapter
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The low-income households in the South Asian countries are highly sensitive to climate-intensive sectors like agriculture, mainly due to the negative impact of climate change on the food production system as a whole. Climate-induced supply shortfalls in agriculture, and consequent food price shocks may adversely affect consumption in these househol...
Chapter
Over the last two decades countries like China, India, Brazil, South Africa, and the Russian Federation experienced sweeping changes in their economies. Despite the lack of synchronicity in the alleged cause of these economic reforms, they were all able to settle onto their respective growth trajectories. It is no wonder then that the global forums...