IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ecq/wpaper/1118.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Labor Regulations and the Firm Size Distribution in Indian Manufacturing

Author

Listed:
  • Rana Hasan
  • Karl Robert L. Jandoc

Abstract

We use data from Indian manufacturing to describe the distribution of firm size in terms of employment and discuss implications for public policy, especially labor regulations. A unique feature of our analysis is the use of nationally representative establishment-level data from both the registered (formal) and unregistered (informal) segments of the Indian manufacturing sector. While we find there to be little difference in the size distribution of firms across states believed to have flexible labor regulations versus those with inflexible labor regulations, restricting attention to labor-intensive industries changes the picture dramatically. Here, we find greater prevalence of larger sized firms in states with flexible labor regulations. Moreover, this differential prevalence is higher among firms that commenced production after 1982, when a key aspect of Indian labor regulations was tightened. Overall, our findings are consistent with the argument that labor regulations have affected firm size adversely.

Suggested Citation

  • Rana Hasan & Karl Robert L. Jandoc, 2012. "Labor Regulations and the Firm Size Distribution in Indian Manufacturing," Working Papers 1118, School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, revised Jan 2012.
    • Handle: RePEc:ecq:wpaper:1118
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://indianeconomy.columbia.edu/sites/default/files/working_papers/wp_2012-3.pdf
    File Function: First version, 2012
    Download Restriction: no

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Panagariya, Arvind, 2011. "India: The Emerging Giant," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780199751563.
    2. T. Ravi Kumar, 2002. "The Impact of Regional Infrastructure Investment in India," Regional Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 36(2), pages 194-200.
    3. Gupta,Poonam & Hasan, Rana & Kumar, Utsav, 2009. "Big Reforms but Small Payoffs: Explaining the Weak Record of Growth in Indian Manufacturing," India Policy Forum, National Council of Applied Economic Research, vol. 5(1), pages 59-123.
    4. Nataraj, Shanthi, 2011. "The impact of trade liberalization on productivity: Evidence from India's formal and informal manufacturing sectors," Journal of International Economics, Elsevier, vol. 85(2), pages 292-301.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Radhicka Kapoor, 2014. "Creating Jobs in India’s Organised Manufacturing Sector," Working Papers id:6208, eSocialSciences.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    India; Labor regulations; Firm size distribution; manufacturing; employment; public policy;

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ecq:wpaper:1118. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Ursula Schwarzhaupt). General contact details of provider: http://edirc.repec.org/data/siclbus.html .

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.