Tanika Chakraborty

Formal Contract Enforcement

Contract enforcement institutions play a critical role in business formation. In projects funded by IDRC, Canada, and the Indian Council of Social Science Research, Tanika Chakraborty is heading those projects that study contract enforcement institutions in India. In a series of papers the collaborators examine, theoretically and empirically, how interactions between formal judiciary and informal contracting networks affect the decision to start a business. One interesting finding is that when the formal court system is inefficient, expansion of informal networks leads to the proliferation of business. However, with a sufficiently strong formal court system, expansion of informal network has a negative effect on business prospects. This result is explained by the contradictions between formal laws and norms used by the informal networks.

Ms Chakraborty’s research interests include development economics, labour economics, institutions and gender. While at CESifo, she will continue her research on Aussiedler in Germany. Using the potentially exogenous Aussiedler settlement policy in Germany, the project seeks to identify the causal impact of parental peer heterogeneity on children’s higher educational outcomes in Germany. The study primarily relies on data provided by the German Microcensus.

Tanika Chakraborty is currently an Assistant Professor at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur. Before joining IIT Kanpur, Ms Chakraborty was a Research Associate at DIW Berlin. She is also an IZA Research Fellow. She has served as a Consultant for UNICEF, the Ministry of Labour and the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways in India. She holds a PhD in Economics from Washington University in St Louis. Her papers have appeared in the Economics of Education Reviewer, the Journal of Comparative Economics, the Review of Economics of the Household and World Development amongst others.