The baseline forecast is for the world economy to continue growing at 3.2 percent during 2024 and 2025, at the same pace as in 2023. A slight acceleration for advanced economies—where growth is expected to rise from 1.6 percent in 2023 to 1.7 percent in 2024 and 1.8 percent in 2025—will be offset by a modest slowdown in emerging market and developing economies from 4.3 percent in 2023 to 4.2 percent in both 2024 and 2025.

We examine the spillover effect of Federal Reserve Board of Governors' speeches on sovereign credit risk and find that the tone of speeches negatively impacts sovereign credit spreads. Speeches that are forward-looking have a stronger impact.

Although ‘One nation, one ombudsman’, following integration of three Ombudsman schemes of RBI viz. the Banking Ombudsman Scheme, 2006; the Ombudsman Scheme for Non-Banking Financial Companies, 2018; and the Ombudsman Scheme for Digital Transactions, 2019, has been generally effective in dealing with customer complaints, issues pertaining to customer grievance redressal continue. There is also a need felt to provide a platform where the regulator’s expectations are highlighted and an interactive forum for the ombudsmen is provided for discussing issues faced by them.

The objective of the conference is to provide a platform to Heads of Treasuries and senior officers involved with risk management function to discuss issues like financial market operations and regulatory perspective, bond market challenges, NDF market, retailing of G-Sec & Forex Market and systemic risks arising due to inter-linkages among financial sector players. This conference would also provide an opportunity to the participants to interact with the regulator, banking experts and peers.

What is the impact of mandatory disclosures of quality on market outcomes in a large developing country? Does impact differ across sub-markets and income groups? We answer these questions in the context of housing markets in India where information asymmetry between homebuyers and developers is high and litigation against housing projects is common.

We document loan characteristics and financial decision making by women for loans given under the “Her Ghar” housing loan scheme by State Bank of India. Loans given to women under the scheme had a lower interest rate relative to loans given to men – however, this effect lasted less than one year.

There has been a declining trend in groundwater depths in India and subsidies on farm electricity contribute to over-extraction of groundwater raising concerns about its sustainability for irrigation. In this paper, I estimate the reduction in groundwater pumping under volumetric pricing of farm electricity for Punjab where farm electricity is free. I use parcel-level cost of cultivation data from the Ministry of Agriculture for 2011-12 to 2013-14 to estimate the production function for paddy using the instrumental variable approach.

This uniquely designed CAFRAL Program on Current Issues in Banking and Finance provides capsuled learning for economists, regulators and bankers to understand various current issues and challenges faced by financial intermediaries in the present interconnected world in which technology is reshaping the landscape of finance at an unprecedented pace. The program will provide insights on the economy in general, its impact on the financial sector and the evolving challenges and opportunities.

This one-day virtual program would provide an opportunity to the participants to understand the regulatory perspective, expectations and concerns. The participants will be apprised of the emerging compliance landscape and challenges including increasing complexities in operations of financial institutions and in adoption of technology.