I am an associate professor of economics at Dartmouth College. My research is focused on the economics of lower-income countries---on how programs and policy choices affect opportunities for the world's poorest. An aspiration of development economists is to build a policy toolkit that can help lower-income countries map a path to prosperity.
Some of my recent projects have focused on judicial bias in India, the impacts of India's large-scale rural roads program, the impacts of mineral sector development, and on measuring intergenerational mobility in developing countries. I have conducted research on the socioeconomic backgrounds of the Nobel laureates and on the U.S. mortality crisis.
My team also builds new open source economic data from information age sources like satellites and data exhaust. While economic data these days is abundant, only a tiny fraction is used due to the complexity of getting signal out of it. We do this work through Development Data Lab, which I founded with Sam Asher and Toby Lunt. We also build and maintain the SHRUG, which aspires to be the best open data platform for socioeconomic research in India and beyond. My Google Scholar page is here.
Publications / In Press
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Intergenerational Mobility in India: New Measures and Estimates Across Time, Space, and Communities
(with Sam Asher and Charlie Rafkin) |
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Rent-Seeking and Criminal Politicians: Evidence from Mining Booms
(with Sam Asher) |
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COVID mortality in India: National survey data and health facility deaths
(with Prabhat Jha, Yashwant Deshmukh, Chinmay Tumbe, Wilson Suraweera, Aditi Bhowmick, Sankalp Sharma, Sze Hang Fu, Leslie Newcombe, Hellen Gelband, and Patrick Brown) |
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Mortality Change Among Less Educated Americans
(with Charlie Rafkin and Sam Asher) |
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In-group bias in the Indian judiciary: Evidence from 5 million criminal cases
(with Elliott Ash, Sam Asher, Aditi Bhowmick, Sandeep Bhupatiraju, Daniel Chen, Tanaya Devi, Christoph Goessman, and Bilal Siddiqi) |
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Impacts of regional lockdown policies on COVID-19 transmission in India in 2020
(with Aarushi Kalra) |
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Big, Open Data for Development: A Vision for India
(with Sam Asher, Aditi Bhowmick, Alison Campion, and Tobias Lunt) |
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Development Research at High Geographic Resolution: An Analysis of Night Lights, Firms, and Poverty in India using the SHRUG Open Data Platform
(AKA the SHRUG paper, with Sam Asher, Toby Lunt, and Ryu Matsuura) |
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Representative Estimates of COVID-19 Infection Fatality Rates from Four Locations in India
(with Rebecca Cai, Vaidehi Tandel, Sam Asher, and Anup Malani) |
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Rural Roads and Local Economic Development
(with Sam Asher) |
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Educational Investment Responses to Economic Opportunity: Evidence from Indian Road Construction
(with Anjali Adukia and Sam Asher) |
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The Ecological Footprint of Transportation Infrastructure
(with Sam Asher and Teevrat Garg) |
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COVID-19 mortality effects of underlying health conditions in India: a modelling study
(with Radhika Jain, Alison Campion, and Sam Asher) |
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Who Runs the International System? Nationality and Leadership in the United Nations Secretariat
(with Eric Werker) |
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Politics and Local Economic Growth: Evidence from India
(with Sam Asher) |
Work in Progress
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Residential Segregation and Unequal Access to Local Public Services in India: Evidence from 1.2m Neighborhoods
(with Anjali Adukia, Sam Asher, Kritarth Jha and Brandon Tan) |
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Cultural capital and access to opportunity: Evidence from subcaste norms in India (with Sam Asher, Aditi Bhowmick, and Maurizio Bussolo) |
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The Long-run Development Impacts of Agricultural Productivity Gains: Evidence from Irrigation Canals in India
(with Sam Asher, Alison Campion, and Doug Gollin) |
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Access to Opportunity in the Sciences: Evidence from the Nobel Laureates (with Sam Asher, Catriona Farquharson, and Eni Iljazi) |
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Intergenerational Mobility Across South Asia (with Sam Asher, Aditi Bhowmick, Maurizio Bussolo, and Jonah Rexer) |
On Hold or Retired
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Digging for Development: Economic Impacts of Mining Booms (with Sam Asher) |
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Adaptive Control of COVID-19 Outbreaks in India: Local, Gradual, and Trigger-based Exit Paths from Lockdown (with with Anup Malani et al.) |
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The Impacts of Local Control over Political Institutions: Evidence from State Splitting in India (with Sam Asher) |
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The Cost of Distance: Geography and Governance in Rural India (with Sam Asher and Karan Nagpal) |
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Moment Forests
(with Denis Nekipelov and Stephen P. Ryan) |
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Getting Signal from Interval Data: Theory and Applications to Mortality and Intergenerational Mobility
(with Sam Asher and Charlie Rafkin) |