I am an applied microeconomist with research interests in Development, Inequality, Public Economics and Political economy. My research explores how inequality affects social mobility, human capital attainment, and the political economy of development.

 I expect to graduate in summer 2026 and will be available for interviews in the 2025-2026 job market.

Land for Opportunity? Deprivation and Intergenerational Mobility in Rural India (with Pulak Ghosh)

Link:  Forthcoming

Abstract: We study how inequality in land wealth inhibits educational mobility in rural India. Using full-count rural census microdata, mobility exhibits a clear step-function across the land distribution—rising sharply from the landless to marginal holders, then flattening. Leveraging historical variation in British-era land-tenure regimes, we show that greater landlessness causally lowers mobility. A model—combining subsistence constraints, dynamic complementarities in schooling, child labour trade-offs over the life cycle, and concavity in returns to land—endogenously generates the step and explains cross-state heterogeneity. The study provides the first census-based causal evidence on the inequality-mobility relationship, with clear mechanisms in a developing setting.

Redistribution and Human Capital: A Structural Approach

Link: Forthcoming

Abstract: We estimate a structural model of human capital accumulation in an agrarian setting. We estimate key parameters of the human capital acquisition function and threshold land wealth levels that enable sufficient human capital investment. We conduct counterfactuals to show the human capital gains from a more egalitarian distribution of land wealth.

Protests Prosociality and Public Goods

Link: Forthcoming

Abstract: The political and economic effects of protest engagement have received considerable attention in the social sciences. This work aims to add to this literature by testing the hypothesis that protest participation can have effects on participants political engagement, inter-group norms and through these channels, on public goods provision and welfare delivery. To this end I study the 2020 farmers agitation in India. My results suggest that village closest to major protest sites with a high share of agriculture dependent workforce see a significant increase in welfare spending in the months following the protests. These effects are driven by increases in targeted poverty alleviation spending that primarily benefits the landless and backward caste groups.

• UBC Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality, PhD Fellow 2025–2026
• UBC Graduate Fellowship 2020–2025
• Vancouver School of Economics — First-Year Ph.D. Fellowship 2020-2021
• UBC Presidents Academic Excellence Award 2020-2026
• UBC International Student Tuition Award 2020-2026