About
Abhishek is a lecturer at Southampton Business School at the University of Southampton. He is currently teaching international banking and advanced time series analysis.
Research
Research groups
Research interests
- Commodity Prices and Balance Sheet Crisis in Emerging Economies
- Structural Macro-Econometrics
- New Keynesian models
- Applied Econometrics
Current research
Currently, I am working on the link between commodity prices and the banking crisis. The research focuses on understanding the causes and consequences of non-performing assets (NPAs) in the Indian banking sector. Since public sector banks have declared significantly higher non-performing assets post assets quality review, a large part of the debate in India has centred around the bad practices and zombie lending by public sector banks as probable reasons. We argue that non-performing assets in the Indian banking sector are highly correlated with commodity prices and this has not received due attention. We find that a decline in commodity prices reduces the profitability of non-financial firms and leads to higher defaults. Thus, banks with higher exposure to commodity-sensitive sectors end up having higher non-performing assets post-commodity price crashes. Since public sector banks on average had higher exposure to commodity sensitive sectors in 2011, they ended up declaring a higher proportion of non-performing assets. Further, banks become capital-constrained due to a high level of non-performing assets and scarcity of capital, and hence these banks reduced lending post-commodity price crashes. These results help us in understanding the twin balance sheet crisis of the 2010s in India.
Publications
Teaching
Prior to his PhD, he worked as an Assistant Professor at the University of Delhi for more than 4 Years where he taught, mathematics for business, statistics, econometrics and economic growth.
Biography
Abhishek worked as Associate Fellow at CSEP (Brookings India) from 2021 to 2022 and was a visiting researcher at the University College London (UCL) from 2019 to 2020. He is currently a non-resident Associate fellow at CSEP.
In the past, he has worked as a Consultant for Queen Mary Global Policy Institute, Asian Development Bank (Manila) and UNU-WIDER. He also worked as a Project Associate at the National Institute of Public finance and Policy (NIPFP), University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, USA, and National Health Service, UK. Abhishek finished his PhD at the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR), Mumbai, in 2022. He has M.Phil. degrees from IGIDR and the University of Delhi, and postgraduate and bachelor’s degrees from the University of Delhi.