In a landmark paper titled The Nature of the Firm published in 1937, then-26 year old economist Ronald Coase addressed the question of why firms exist. “Outside the firm, price movements direct production, which is coordinated through a series of exchange transactions…
I wrote a piece for Mint on how structural policy reforms have a similar effect to technology-driven deflation. The thesis for this article came from a tweetstorm: If your existing asset base achieves 30% output increase, you defer capex, recruitment….
Harsh recently wrote an excellent piece on how India’s economy will grow from the current $2.5 trillion GDP to $12 trillion by 2030. His prediction rests on on two planks: increasing participation of women in the workforce, and technological change….
The accounting equation, a fundamental identity of accounting, states that: Assets = Liabilities + Owner’s Equity A business converts debt (liabilities) and equity (owner’s equity) into assets that generate cash flows. Those on the right side of the equation make…
English medium types like me read an Oscar Wilde short story called The Model Millionaire in school. The story is about how Hughie Erskine, despite being poor, gives away whatever little he has to somebody who he thinks is an…
Over the last three years, entrepreneurship has captured India’s imagination, and for good reasons. Never in our history has it been possible for first-generation entrepreneurs to start companies, raise seed capital and build a business in the way we have…
Momentous changes in India’s equity market microstructure will improve market efficiency and smooth volatility over time. Emerging markets are frequently stereotyped as being prone to wild swings and outsized volatility. In particular, India has historically been a market where foreign…
Has the Indian startup opportunity been wildly over-estimated? Mahesh Murthy’s article on this question has triggered a debate. Mahesh feels the “copy-paste” approach will not work in India — provided that most of India’s highly-valued startups are simply clones of successful US…
In his book Zero to One, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Thiel addresses the distinction between globalization and technology. Globalization constitutes “horizontal progress”, he writes, or “taking things that work somewhere and making them work everywhere”; and China is the “paradigmatic…