Shanthi Nataraj

There are two commonly accepted views about command-and-control (CAC) environmental regulation. First, CAC delivers environmental outcomes at very high cost. Second, in a developing country with weak regulatory institutions, CACs may not even yield environmental benefits: regulators can force firms to install pollution abatement equipment, but cannot ensure that they use it. We examine India's experience and find evidence that CAC policies achieved substantial environmental benefits at a relatively low cost. Constructing an establishment-level panel from 1998 to 2009, we find that the CAC regulations imposed by India's Supreme Court on 17 cities improved air quality with little effect on establishment productivity. We document a strong effect of deterred entry of high-polluting industries ...

An ongoing debate in employment policy is whether promoting small and medium enterprises creates more employment. Do small enterprises generate more employment growth than larger firms? We use the elimination of small-scale industry (SSI) promotion in India to address this question. For 60 years, SSI promotion in India focused on reserving certain products for manufacture by small and medium establishments. We identify the consequences for employment growth, investment, output, productivity, and wages of dismantling India’s SSI reservations. We exploit variation in the timing of de-reservation across products; our identification strategy is also robust to measuring the long-run impact of national SSI policy changes using variation in pre-treatment exposure at the district level, and to co...

Published: Leslie A. Martin & Shanthi Nataraj & Ann E. Harrison, 2017. "In with the Big, Out with the Small: Removing Small-Scale Reservations in India," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 107(2), pages 354-386, February. citation courtesy of

The new trade theory emphasizes the role of market-share reallocations across firms ("stealing") in driving productivity growth, while the older literature focused on average productivity improvements ("learning"). We use comprehensive, firm-level data from India's organized manufacturing sector to show that market-share reallocations did play an important role in aggregate productivity gains immediately following the start of India's trade reforms in 1991. However, aggregate productivity gains during the overall 20-year period from 1985 to 2004 were driven largely by improvements in average productivity. By exploiting the variation in reforms across industries, we document that the average productivity increases can be attributed to India's trade liberalization and FDI reforms. Finally, w...

Published: Ann E. Harrison & Leslie A. Martin & Shanthi Nataraj, 2013. "Learning versus Stealing: How Important Are Market-Share Reallocations to India's Productivity Growth?," World Bank Economic Review, World Bank Group, vol. 27(2), pages 202-228. citation courtesy of