I am currently an Associate Professor at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.
I am trained as a development micro-economist with a research focus that examines how economic, social, political, and institutional forces shape human capital investments and outcomes at the grassroots level of society. Much of my work centers on South Asia, though my interests extend globally.
The core idea that permeates through much of my work is that markets are shaped by contexts. Economic decisions — such as investments in health, education, migration or environmental safety—are profoundly influenced by complex webs of cultural, social, and political forces. I use both quantitative and qualitative methods to unpack these complex relationships and their implications for development policy and practice.
Research Agenda
My research agenda has evolved into four interconnected components that examine how institutions, both formal and informal, shape human capital and development outcomes at the grassroots of society:
1. Health and Environmental Policy
I examine the long-term economic and demographic impacts of large-scale policies. My work includes evaluating family planning programs, maternal and child health initiatives, and environmental interventions. Recent projects explore how judicial environmental policies affect air quality and infant mortality in India, and I am currently conducting a randomized controlled trial in Bangladesh examining the integrated effects of poverty alleviation and depression treatment on women’s mental health outcomes.
2. Law, Justice, and Institutional Access
A significant portion of my research examines how legal institutions and judicial processes affect development outcomes, particularly for marginalized communities. Using innovative approaches that combine human coding with AI assistance, I analyze decades of environmental litigation in India to understand how judicial decisions impact justice. My work on Indian courts examines how social identity—including caste, religion, and gender—influences access to justice and case outcomes, revealing important disparities in legal treatment across different groups.
3. Collective Action and Local Politics
Drawing from extensive fieldwork, I examine the long-term impacts of collective institutions such as women’s farmer cooperatives, self-help groups, and community organizations. This work explores how collective action can overcome market failures and institutional weaknesses, particularly in contexts where individual agency is constrained by social norms and economic limitations.
4. Social Identity and Human Capital
I investigate how facets of social identity—religion, caste, endogamous marriage patterns, and gender—have long-term economic consequences, particularly for women and children. This includes examining spatial variation in demographic outcomes, the economics of consanguineous marriages, and how social hierarchies perpetuate inequality across generations.
Methodological Approach
My work employs diverse methodological approaches, ranging from the analysis of large administrative datasets to quantify the effects of public policies, to small-scale studies involving extensive fieldwork with mixed quantitative and qualitative methods. Increasingly, I incorporate innovative techniques including machine learning and AI-assisted analysis to process large corpora of legal documents and environmental data. This methodological diversity allows me to examine questions of human capital and development from multiple angles, providing both broad policy insights and deep contextual understanding.
My complete CV is available here.