Paucity of reliable data is a serious challenge in emerging markets research. It makes datasets creation an important activity for CAF. In 2009 – 10, we have put together two special databases that will make new and path-breaking research in several important areas possible.

Database on finance, growth and inequality
It is a database of 182 countries for the period 1950 to 2009. This is the most comprehensive database on finance, inequality and growth, and extends all existing databases. Our database combines the information on income and inequality contained in the UNU-WIDER dataset and the Human Development Report published by UNDP; the World Bank database on financial development, and databases on legal, institutional and political variables compiled by different researchers in their respective fields of work. This database has the potential of facilitating research not only in finance, inequality and growth, but in many other subjects like gender equality, poverty, political systems, and government policy.

Database on orders and trades in Indian capital markets
With special data provided by the National Stock Exchange (NSE), this database contains the complete trading records of all stocks that traded on the exchange between January 1, 2005 and June 30, 2006. The most significant characteristic of the dataset is that it comes at the transaction level which identifies both counterparties (buyer and seller) in a transaction, unlike all other existing datasets which have information only on one side (buy or sell). The dataset contains about a billion trading records (about two billion records if one considers buys and sells separately) carried out by over three million distinct investors. It is perhaps the most comprehensive dataset that exist in the world today on trading behaviour, and addresses the problems of representativeness and missing information that plague existing datasets. Until now empirical evidence on the various hypotheses about trading behaviour of different classes of investors has come from analysing the actions of participants in the more developed and sophisticated markets like the USA and Finland. Verification of these findings with evidence obtained from emerging economies can make a significant contribution to our understanding of the investor behaviour across the world.

Database and Survey Questionnaire on Credit Rationing in Informal Markets