Panchanan Das | University of Calcutta (original) (raw)
Papers by Panchanan Das
The least squares sample regression function (SRF) is an estimate of the population regression fu... more The least squares sample regression function (SRF) is an estimate of the population regression function (PRF). The PRF describes how the conditional mean changes with x. The OLS parameter estimate \(\hat{\beta }\) used in SRF is a random variable. Normally, \(\hat{\beta }\) is not equal to β, the parameter. We can exploit the randomness behaviour of \(\hat{\beta }\) to make inferences about β. Statistical inference is a process by which we can make inference about the unknown population on the basis of the estimates from the known sample. In classical econometrics, the principal way of doing this is performing hypothesis tests and constructing confidence intervals. This chapter deals with this problem.
The basic objective of the present study is not to deal with the problems of estimation of povert... more The basic objective of the present study is not to deal with the problems of estimation of poverty as such, but to identify some of the key contributory factors of poverty in rural West Bengal. This study accounts for geographical spill overs of poverty and examines the probable effects of demographic and other household characteristics as well as some location specific factors on household poverty in West Bengal by utilising household level information taken from the 61st round on household consumer survey by National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO). We have applied discrete choice model with Logit specification to consider two alternative and mutually exclusive situations, a household being considered as poor or not. The major factors discriminating against household poverty include family size, highest education in the family, social and religious identity of the household, occupation type and some location specific variables like holding size, female literacy rate and so on. T...
This paper relates mortality crises in India to harvest fluctuations. It is difficult to quantify... more This paper relates mortality crises in India to harvest fluctuations. It is difficult to quantify the intensity of famines accurately during the period 1820–1870 because of the lack of relevant data. The contribution of the paper is to relate demographic crises to harvest fluctuations in two macro-regions of India and to do it by using data from an early period of British rule. In the process, it also tackles certain revisionist views that have been forwarded in recent times.
This chapter examines the incidence, depth and severity of poverty and the effects of the major n... more This chapter examines the incidence, depth and severity of poverty and the effects of the major non-income dimensions on poverty in India after more than a decade of the initiation of the process of integration by using an independently pooled cross section from the 61st and 66th round household-level unit data provided by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO). Poverty estimates are based on relative poverty lines at 75 and 50 % of the median value of the distribution of per capita expenditure of the respective population groups. The chapter focuses on education, type of employment, land rights, social and religious factors, and gender-related issues among the non-income dimensions of poverty. The rising poverty incidence on the basis of relative poverty line in urban areas, as evidenced in this study, supports the hypothesis that urban inequality increased significantly during the post-reforms period in India. Per capita consumption expenditure on monthly basis in logarithmic te...
Classical linear regression model requires that the dependent variable, regressand, should vary b... more Classical linear regression model requires that the dependent variable, regressand, should vary between −∞ and +∞. But, most of the economic variables are restricted in a sense that they are nonnegative or even much more limited in their values. This chapter deals with econometric models of limited dependent variables capturing economic agent’s response in limited way. In such a model, the response variable is represented as 1 or 0, corresponding to responses of success or failure in a particular situation. A simple econometric model with binary dependent variable and a set of explanatory factors that we expect will influence the respondent’s decision is the linear probability model. But, linear probability model produces predicted probability of success that can take negative as well as the values exceeding unity. This limitation can be overcome by using a binary response model. Two commonly used binary response models are the binomial probit and binomial logit models.
This monograph provides some empirical results on growth behaviour of output, employment and prod... more This monograph provides some empirical results on growth behaviour of output, employment and productivity in manufacturing industries in West Bengal and Gujarat over 1970 to 2002. The empirical analysis proceeds by analysing, first, the contrasting features of overall growth and structural changes between the states. Overall employment structure and the incidence of casualisation of workforce are explored by utilising NSS data of different rounds on Employment and Unemployment Situation in India. By applying the theory of cointegration and vector autoregressive analysis on the ASI data, this study examines the role of manufacturing growth on overall economic growth and also on employment growth in manufacturing in these two states. Stochastic production frontier model has been employed in a panel data frame to provide some empirical estimates of productive efficiency and technical change in the factory sector across two-digit manufacturing industries. The distributional aspect of gr...
The nature of recession today because of the outbreak of COVID-19 is completely different from th... more The nature of recession today because of the outbreak of COVID-19 is completely different from that of Great recession of the 1930s and macroeconomic risks brought on by the pandemic could be severe. There is a trade-off between the severity of the recession and the health consequences of the pandemic. The containment policies undertaken by the State in most of the countries including India in the form of economic lockdown primarily to maintain social distance exacerbate recession but raise welfare by reducing the probability of new infection and death toll caused by the pandemic. Different sectors of the economy will be affected adversely depending upon its intensity, spread and duration of the pandemic. Till now, as the cost of externality is very high because of absence of vaccination and treatment of this disease, the State has to impose more aggressive policy in the form of near complete lockdown or in some cases complete lockdown of the economy to reduce the probability of bei...
The objectives of any regression analysis are to estimate the unknown parameters in the model, to... more The objectives of any regression analysis are to estimate the unknown parameters in the model, to validate whether the functional form of the model is consistent with the hypothesised model based on the theory, and to use the model to predict future values of the response variable. This chapter discusses linear regression model and its application with cross section data. Linear regression is a method of estimating the conditional expected value of the response or dependent variable given the values of a set of predictor or independent variables. Multiple regression analysis is more amenable to ceteris paribus analysis because it allows us to explicitly control for many other factors which simultaneously affect the dependent variable. The power of multiple regression analysis is that it provides the ceteris paribus interpretation even though the data have not been collected in a ceteris paribus fashion.
This chapter discusses some basic steps used in econometrics and statistical software, Stata 15.1... more This chapter discusses some basic steps used in econometrics and statistical software, Stata 15.1, for useful application of econometric theories with real-life data. Econometric methods are helpful in explaining the stochastic relationship in mathematical form among variables. Applied econometrics is the application of econometric theory to analyse economic phenomenon with economic data. While an economic model provides a theoretical relation, an econometric model is a relationship used to analyse real-life situation. The formulation of economic models in an empirically testable form is an econometric model. The random error or disturbance term is very much powerful in econometric analysis. One of the major tasks of statistics and econometrics is to obtain information about populations. The main aim of econometric analysis is to obtain information about the population through the analysis of the sample. Regression analysis is an important tool used in econometrics to analyse quanti...
Despite the initiatives of the Finance Commission of India, fiscal performance has been deteriora... more Despite the initiatives of the Finance Commission of India, fiscal performance has been deteriorating and increasingly diverging across Indian states. Given that the state governments are endowed with expenditure autonomy, this paper investigates whether the composition of expenditure of the subnational governments has an impact on the degree of indebtedness. A panel analysis for the 17 non-special category states over 1980–2013 indicates that apart from the budget structure, the state-specific factors affecting fiscal performance plays an important role in government borrowing. Curiously enough, government borrowing is more responsive to revenue expenditure than capital outlay and has more growth-augmenting effect through revenue expenditure.
The overwhelming importance of the unorganised sector in the national economy makes it imperative... more The overwhelming importance of the unorganised sector in the national economy makes it imperative for the CSO and the State DESs to depend on benchmark surveys to estimate gross domestic product or net domestic product at the national and state level. This study highlights the differences between CSO´s estimates of NDP and the aggregate values of different state government´s estimates of net state domestic product. NDP in national accounts has been persistently higher than the sum of state estimates of domestic products. No long-term relation is also found between the trends in the share of agriculture in NDP and the sum of agricultural NSDP for all states. Interestingly, gap between the shares of industrial output to total domestic product in national and state estimates tended to widen since the mid-1990s when the process of infomalisation was afoot.
Journal of Income & Wealth, 2012
This paper examines the relative deprivation of different social and religious groups in India in... more This paper examines the relative deprivation of different social and religious groups in India in terms of prevalence, depth and severity indices of poverty since the early 1990s. The risks of poverty have been worked out at 75 percent and 50 percent of the median expenditure per capita across the major social and religious groups in India with unit level data of household consumer survey at 50th, 55th, 61st and 66th rounds conducted by the NSSO. In our estimate, lower the threshold higher is the risk of poverty. The poverty risk has been significantly higher in urban areas than in rural areas at any threshold level of consumption everywhere in India. Scheduled tribes among the social groups and Muslims among religious groups are mostly deprived in terms of head count measure. The extreme poverty measured at 50 percent of the median expenditure per capita has also been significantly higher for scheduled tribes. Although the poverty rates at 75 percent median expenditure were higher ...
The purpose of this paper is to explore the answers to several questions raised by the fact that ... more The purpose of this paper is to explore the answers to several questions raised by the fact that econometrics in theory is not the same as econometrics in practice. An obvious question is why econometrics in theory differs from econometrics in practice. The simple answer is that the benefits from data mining are great. Another question raised by the difference between econometrics in theory and econometrics in practice is how to reconcile the two. The hope is to make the data miner behave more like a classical statistician.
India Studies in Business and Economics
This study explores how inequality in wage income is associated with workers’ human capital and e... more This study explores how inequality in wage income is associated with workers’ human capital and employment status during the high growth regime that started in the early 1980s in India, with household and personal-level information from employment and unemployment survey. The study observes that ‘within’ group inequality declined very slowly, but the ‘between’ group inequality increased markedly during this period. Conditional wage earnings at different quantiles have been estimated to locate the possible effects of human capital, particularly education and employment characteristics. The study observes that the wage gap between workers at different percentiles increased over time during the high growth regime, and at a higher rate at the upper end of the wage distribution. The workers’ schooling has favourable effect on wage income as expected. Wage income is increased with higher level of education at a higher proportional rate at higher percentiles in the wage distribution. As returns to education have significant impact on wage income, the wage distribution became more unequal because of the difference in access to education.
Econometrics in Theory and Practice
This chapter examines the incidence, depth and severity of poverty and the effects of the major n... more This chapter examines the incidence, depth and severity of poverty and the effects of the major non-income dimensions on poverty in India after more than a decade of the initiation of the process of integration by using an independently pooled cross section from the 61st and 66th round household-level unit data provided by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO). Poverty estimates are based on relative poverty lines at 75 and 50 % of the median value of the distribution of per capita expenditure of the respective population groups. The chapter focuses on education, type of employment, land rights, social and religious factors, and gender-related issues among the non-income dimensions of poverty. The rising poverty incidence on the basis of relative poverty line in urban areas, as evidenced in this study, supports the hypothesis that urban inequality increased significantly during the post-reforms period in India. Per capita consumption expenditure on monthly basis in logarithmic terms is used in this study as a proxy for well-being or poverty. The study observes that land as a productive asset had very little positive effect on poverty. But the effect of education on the level of well-being was positive and increased with the level of education in every state in India. Technical education, a component of workers' skill, improved consumption per capita in all states except Chhattisgarh and Kerala. Scheduled Tribes and Scheduled Castes among the social groups and Muslims among religious groups are mostly deprived in terms of consumption per capita.
American Journal of Applied Sciences
Econometrics in Theory and Practice
Voprosy obrazovaniya / Educational Studies Moscow
The objective of this study is to provide a quantifiable measure of the distributional content of... more The objective of this study is to provide a quantifiable measure of the distributional content of education and its implications on earnings distribution by gender across different groups of people by using survey data in India. We analyse educational disparities among the children with age up to 14 years by gender, and household specific characters with Indian data. The study observes that, in the rural economy, the girls have less access to full time education than boys. In the urban region, on the other hand, the access to full time education at primary level is more for girls than for boys. The estimated coverage is less in the rural areas than in urban areas. The HOI is more among the urban children than among the rural children. Parent's education has the highest contribution to inequality of opportunity to full time education at primary or upper primary level.
Journal of Quantitative Economics
The least squares sample regression function (SRF) is an estimate of the population regression fu... more The least squares sample regression function (SRF) is an estimate of the population regression function (PRF). The PRF describes how the conditional mean changes with x. The OLS parameter estimate \(\hat{\beta }\) used in SRF is a random variable. Normally, \(\hat{\beta }\) is not equal to β, the parameter. We can exploit the randomness behaviour of \(\hat{\beta }\) to make inferences about β. Statistical inference is a process by which we can make inference about the unknown population on the basis of the estimates from the known sample. In classical econometrics, the principal way of doing this is performing hypothesis tests and constructing confidence intervals. This chapter deals with this problem.
The basic objective of the present study is not to deal with the problems of estimation of povert... more The basic objective of the present study is not to deal with the problems of estimation of poverty as such, but to identify some of the key contributory factors of poverty in rural West Bengal. This study accounts for geographical spill overs of poverty and examines the probable effects of demographic and other household characteristics as well as some location specific factors on household poverty in West Bengal by utilising household level information taken from the 61st round on household consumer survey by National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO). We have applied discrete choice model with Logit specification to consider two alternative and mutually exclusive situations, a household being considered as poor or not. The major factors discriminating against household poverty include family size, highest education in the family, social and religious identity of the household, occupation type and some location specific variables like holding size, female literacy rate and so on. T...
This paper relates mortality crises in India to harvest fluctuations. It is difficult to quantify... more This paper relates mortality crises in India to harvest fluctuations. It is difficult to quantify the intensity of famines accurately during the period 1820–1870 because of the lack of relevant data. The contribution of the paper is to relate demographic crises to harvest fluctuations in two macro-regions of India and to do it by using data from an early period of British rule. In the process, it also tackles certain revisionist views that have been forwarded in recent times.
This chapter examines the incidence, depth and severity of poverty and the effects of the major n... more This chapter examines the incidence, depth and severity of poverty and the effects of the major non-income dimensions on poverty in India after more than a decade of the initiation of the process of integration by using an independently pooled cross section from the 61st and 66th round household-level unit data provided by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO). Poverty estimates are based on relative poverty lines at 75 and 50 % of the median value of the distribution of per capita expenditure of the respective population groups. The chapter focuses on education, type of employment, land rights, social and religious factors, and gender-related issues among the non-income dimensions of poverty. The rising poverty incidence on the basis of relative poverty line in urban areas, as evidenced in this study, supports the hypothesis that urban inequality increased significantly during the post-reforms period in India. Per capita consumption expenditure on monthly basis in logarithmic te...
Classical linear regression model requires that the dependent variable, regressand, should vary b... more Classical linear regression model requires that the dependent variable, regressand, should vary between −∞ and +∞. But, most of the economic variables are restricted in a sense that they are nonnegative or even much more limited in their values. This chapter deals with econometric models of limited dependent variables capturing economic agent’s response in limited way. In such a model, the response variable is represented as 1 or 0, corresponding to responses of success or failure in a particular situation. A simple econometric model with binary dependent variable and a set of explanatory factors that we expect will influence the respondent’s decision is the linear probability model. But, linear probability model produces predicted probability of success that can take negative as well as the values exceeding unity. This limitation can be overcome by using a binary response model. Two commonly used binary response models are the binomial probit and binomial logit models.
This monograph provides some empirical results on growth behaviour of output, employment and prod... more This monograph provides some empirical results on growth behaviour of output, employment and productivity in manufacturing industries in West Bengal and Gujarat over 1970 to 2002. The empirical analysis proceeds by analysing, first, the contrasting features of overall growth and structural changes between the states. Overall employment structure and the incidence of casualisation of workforce are explored by utilising NSS data of different rounds on Employment and Unemployment Situation in India. By applying the theory of cointegration and vector autoregressive analysis on the ASI data, this study examines the role of manufacturing growth on overall economic growth and also on employment growth in manufacturing in these two states. Stochastic production frontier model has been employed in a panel data frame to provide some empirical estimates of productive efficiency and technical change in the factory sector across two-digit manufacturing industries. The distributional aspect of gr...
The nature of recession today because of the outbreak of COVID-19 is completely different from th... more The nature of recession today because of the outbreak of COVID-19 is completely different from that of Great recession of the 1930s and macroeconomic risks brought on by the pandemic could be severe. There is a trade-off between the severity of the recession and the health consequences of the pandemic. The containment policies undertaken by the State in most of the countries including India in the form of economic lockdown primarily to maintain social distance exacerbate recession but raise welfare by reducing the probability of new infection and death toll caused by the pandemic. Different sectors of the economy will be affected adversely depending upon its intensity, spread and duration of the pandemic. Till now, as the cost of externality is very high because of absence of vaccination and treatment of this disease, the State has to impose more aggressive policy in the form of near complete lockdown or in some cases complete lockdown of the economy to reduce the probability of bei...
The objectives of any regression analysis are to estimate the unknown parameters in the model, to... more The objectives of any regression analysis are to estimate the unknown parameters in the model, to validate whether the functional form of the model is consistent with the hypothesised model based on the theory, and to use the model to predict future values of the response variable. This chapter discusses linear regression model and its application with cross section data. Linear regression is a method of estimating the conditional expected value of the response or dependent variable given the values of a set of predictor or independent variables. Multiple regression analysis is more amenable to ceteris paribus analysis because it allows us to explicitly control for many other factors which simultaneously affect the dependent variable. The power of multiple regression analysis is that it provides the ceteris paribus interpretation even though the data have not been collected in a ceteris paribus fashion.
This chapter discusses some basic steps used in econometrics and statistical software, Stata 15.1... more This chapter discusses some basic steps used in econometrics and statistical software, Stata 15.1, for useful application of econometric theories with real-life data. Econometric methods are helpful in explaining the stochastic relationship in mathematical form among variables. Applied econometrics is the application of econometric theory to analyse economic phenomenon with economic data. While an economic model provides a theoretical relation, an econometric model is a relationship used to analyse real-life situation. The formulation of economic models in an empirically testable form is an econometric model. The random error or disturbance term is very much powerful in econometric analysis. One of the major tasks of statistics and econometrics is to obtain information about populations. The main aim of econometric analysis is to obtain information about the population through the analysis of the sample. Regression analysis is an important tool used in econometrics to analyse quanti...
Despite the initiatives of the Finance Commission of India, fiscal performance has been deteriora... more Despite the initiatives of the Finance Commission of India, fiscal performance has been deteriorating and increasingly diverging across Indian states. Given that the state governments are endowed with expenditure autonomy, this paper investigates whether the composition of expenditure of the subnational governments has an impact on the degree of indebtedness. A panel analysis for the 17 non-special category states over 1980–2013 indicates that apart from the budget structure, the state-specific factors affecting fiscal performance plays an important role in government borrowing. Curiously enough, government borrowing is more responsive to revenue expenditure than capital outlay and has more growth-augmenting effect through revenue expenditure.
The overwhelming importance of the unorganised sector in the national economy makes it imperative... more The overwhelming importance of the unorganised sector in the national economy makes it imperative for the CSO and the State DESs to depend on benchmark surveys to estimate gross domestic product or net domestic product at the national and state level. This study highlights the differences between CSO´s estimates of NDP and the aggregate values of different state government´s estimates of net state domestic product. NDP in national accounts has been persistently higher than the sum of state estimates of domestic products. No long-term relation is also found between the trends in the share of agriculture in NDP and the sum of agricultural NSDP for all states. Interestingly, gap between the shares of industrial output to total domestic product in national and state estimates tended to widen since the mid-1990s when the process of infomalisation was afoot.
Journal of Income & Wealth, 2012
This paper examines the relative deprivation of different social and religious groups in India in... more This paper examines the relative deprivation of different social and religious groups in India in terms of prevalence, depth and severity indices of poverty since the early 1990s. The risks of poverty have been worked out at 75 percent and 50 percent of the median expenditure per capita across the major social and religious groups in India with unit level data of household consumer survey at 50th, 55th, 61st and 66th rounds conducted by the NSSO. In our estimate, lower the threshold higher is the risk of poverty. The poverty risk has been significantly higher in urban areas than in rural areas at any threshold level of consumption everywhere in India. Scheduled tribes among the social groups and Muslims among religious groups are mostly deprived in terms of head count measure. The extreme poverty measured at 50 percent of the median expenditure per capita has also been significantly higher for scheduled tribes. Although the poverty rates at 75 percent median expenditure were higher ...
The purpose of this paper is to explore the answers to several questions raised by the fact that ... more The purpose of this paper is to explore the answers to several questions raised by the fact that econometrics in theory is not the same as econometrics in practice. An obvious question is why econometrics in theory differs from econometrics in practice. The simple answer is that the benefits from data mining are great. Another question raised by the difference between econometrics in theory and econometrics in practice is how to reconcile the two. The hope is to make the data miner behave more like a classical statistician.
India Studies in Business and Economics
This study explores how inequality in wage income is associated with workers’ human capital and e... more This study explores how inequality in wage income is associated with workers’ human capital and employment status during the high growth regime that started in the early 1980s in India, with household and personal-level information from employment and unemployment survey. The study observes that ‘within’ group inequality declined very slowly, but the ‘between’ group inequality increased markedly during this period. Conditional wage earnings at different quantiles have been estimated to locate the possible effects of human capital, particularly education and employment characteristics. The study observes that the wage gap between workers at different percentiles increased over time during the high growth regime, and at a higher rate at the upper end of the wage distribution. The workers’ schooling has favourable effect on wage income as expected. Wage income is increased with higher level of education at a higher proportional rate at higher percentiles in the wage distribution. As returns to education have significant impact on wage income, the wage distribution became more unequal because of the difference in access to education.
Econometrics in Theory and Practice
This chapter examines the incidence, depth and severity of poverty and the effects of the major n... more This chapter examines the incidence, depth and severity of poverty and the effects of the major non-income dimensions on poverty in India after more than a decade of the initiation of the process of integration by using an independently pooled cross section from the 61st and 66th round household-level unit data provided by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO). Poverty estimates are based on relative poverty lines at 75 and 50 % of the median value of the distribution of per capita expenditure of the respective population groups. The chapter focuses on education, type of employment, land rights, social and religious factors, and gender-related issues among the non-income dimensions of poverty. The rising poverty incidence on the basis of relative poverty line in urban areas, as evidenced in this study, supports the hypothesis that urban inequality increased significantly during the post-reforms period in India. Per capita consumption expenditure on monthly basis in logarithmic terms is used in this study as a proxy for well-being or poverty. The study observes that land as a productive asset had very little positive effect on poverty. But the effect of education on the level of well-being was positive and increased with the level of education in every state in India. Technical education, a component of workers' skill, improved consumption per capita in all states except Chhattisgarh and Kerala. Scheduled Tribes and Scheduled Castes among the social groups and Muslims among religious groups are mostly deprived in terms of consumption per capita.
American Journal of Applied Sciences
Econometrics in Theory and Practice
Voprosy obrazovaniya / Educational Studies Moscow
The objective of this study is to provide a quantifiable measure of the distributional content of... more The objective of this study is to provide a quantifiable measure of the distributional content of education and its implications on earnings distribution by gender across different groups of people by using survey data in India. We analyse educational disparities among the children with age up to 14 years by gender, and household specific characters with Indian data. The study observes that, in the rural economy, the girls have less access to full time education than boys. In the urban region, on the other hand, the access to full time education at primary level is more for girls than for boys. The estimated coverage is less in the rural areas than in urban areas. The HOI is more among the urban children than among the rural children. Parent's education has the highest contribution to inequality of opportunity to full time education at primary or upper primary level.
Journal of Quantitative Economics