Cash and the Economy: Evidence from India's Demonetization

Gabriel Chodorow-Reich, Gita Gopinath, Prachi Mishra, Abhinav Narayanan

NBER Working Paper No. 25370
Issued in December 2018, Revised in May 2019

---- Acknowledgments ----

We thank Martin Rama and Robert Carl Michael Beyer of the World Bank for sharing night lights data, Tilottama Ghosh at the Earth Observation Group at NOAA for clarifying many basic questions relating to the nightlights data, National Payments Corporation of India for providing data on ATM and POS transactions, and Quantta for providing geocode coordinates. We thank Fernando Alvarez (discussant), Pol Antras (editor), Vimal Balasubramaniam (discussant), Robert Barro (editor), Bent Sorenson (discussant), four anonymous referees, and numerous seminar participants for their comments. Gabriel Konigsberg and Anna Stansbury provided excellent research assistance. Gita Gopinath is Economic Counselor and Director of Research at the IMF. She completed this work before joining the IMF, when she was Professor at Harvard. Ms. Mishra was employed at the IMF at the time this work was completed. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Reserve Bank of India, Goldman Sachs, the International Monetary Fund, or any other institution with which the authors are affliated. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

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