Articles by Partha Ray

Banks and financial institutions play a major role in governance of non-financial companies in India through the mechanism of nominee directors. This paper probes two allied issues: firstly, the isolation of the firm specific factors which determine the presence of bank nominee directors on boards and secondly, whether companies, with bank nominee directors exhibit better performance/governance than companies with no banker representation on their boards. A Probit model estimated over a cross-section of Indian manufacturing firms for 2003, indicates that bankers on boards seem to exert a healthy impact on the companies. In fact, large public limited companies are likely to exhibit banker representation, primarily in their role as expertise providers. The evidence from Tobit model reconfirms these results.

This paper looks at empirically assessing the determinants of risk-weighted bank capital ratios of state-owned banks in India during 1996-2002. Bank-specific characteristics, variables at the banking industry level and general macroeconomic factors have been taken into consideration for this purpose. The findings suggest that bank specific factors play an important role in influencing bank capital ratios in India.

The paper examines whether monetary policy has similar effects across major states in the Indian polity. Impulse response functions from an estimated Structural Vector Auto Regression (SVAR) reveal two sets of states: a core of states that respond to monetary policy in a significant fashion vis-à-vis others whose response is less significant. The paper attempts to trace the reasons for the differential response of these two sets of states in terms of financial deepening and differential industry mix.

Role of Interest Rates and Exchange Rate in Conduct of Indian Monetary Policy Partha Ray Himanshu Joshi Mridul Saggar This paper explores new dimensions in the monetary transmission mechanism in the environment of liberalisation initiated in the early 1990s and in the context of growing integration of financial markets. An examination of the Chakravarty Committee paradigm in this changed milieu motivated us to see the role of two key variables in the conduct of monetary policy, viz, interest rates and exchange rates. The long-run relationship between money, prices, output, and exchange rate is examined and the impact of money market disequilibrium on interest rate is traced by testing the joint significance of the lags of disequilibrium errors. We also conduct weak and block exogenity tests for exchange rates. Interest rates and exchange rates are seen to be endogenously determined in the liberalised regime beginning 1992-93, raising the possibility of the change in transmission mechanism following the advent of financial reforms. The recent shifts in the operating procedure of monetary policy are in consonance with our findings.