I am an associate professor of economics at Dartmouth College. I work on economic development, political economy and economic geography using large administrative and remote sensing data. Some of my recent projects have focused on 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 also have several projects on machine learning and statistical methods with applications to the U.S. mortality crisis. I am founder of Development Data Lab and a creator of The SHRUG, which Sam Asher, Toby Lunt and I are turning into the best open data platform for socioeconomic research in India and beyond. My Google Scholar page is here.

Fall 2020 Econ 24 @Dartmouth! If you're interested in this class but can't see the material on Canvas, please see: (i) the syllabus; (ii) a video describing how the course will work.

Publications


💎

Rent-Seeking and Criminal Politicians: Evidence from Mining Booms (with Sam Asher)
(Conditionally accepted at Review of Economics and Statistics)

🚛

Rural Roads and Local Economic Development (with Sam Asher)
American Economic Review 110:3 (2020)

📖

Educational Investment Responses to Economic Opportunity: Evidence from Indian Road Construction (with Anjali Adukia and Sam Asher)
AEJ: Applied Economics 12:1 (2020)

🌲

The Ecological Footprint of Transportation Infrastructure (with Sam Asher and Teevrat Garg)
Economic Journal 130:629, 1173-1199 (2020)

🇸🇪

Who Runs the International System? Nationality and Leadership in the United Nations Secretariat (with Eric Werker)
The Review of International Organizations 14:1 (2019)
→ Replication files and data on nationality of senior UN staff (1947-2013).

🗳

Politics and Local Economic Growth: Evidence from India (with Sam Asher)
AEJ: Applied Economics 9:1 (2017).
→ Replication code and data posted at AEJ:Applied Economics.

Papers Under Review

💀

Mortality Change Among Less Educated Americans (with Sam Asher and Charlie Rafkin) (Revise and Resubmit at AEJ: Applied Economics)
→ Replication/methods code: github/paulnov/paper-nra-mortality

☝

Intergenerational Mobility in India: New Methods and Estimates Across Time, Space, and Communities (with Sam Asher and Charlie Rafkin) (submitted)
→ Fact Sheet for media.
→ All-India mobility map.
→ Interactive Delhi mobility map.
→ Code for generating bottom half mobility (μ-0-50), all-India town, subdistrict, and district-level local mobility estimates: github/paulnov/paper-anr-mobility-india

🌴

Moment Forests (with Denis Nekipelov and Stephen P. Ryan) NBER Working Paper No. 22976 (submitted)

📈

The Socioeconomic High-resolution Rural-Urban Geographic panel for India (SHRUG) (with Sam Asher, Toby Lunt, and Ryu Matsuura)
(Revise and resubmit at World Bank Economic Review)
→ SHRUG Codebook
→ Download the SHRUG

Work in Progress

🦠

The COVID-19 mortality effects of underlying health conditions in India: a modelling study (with Radhika Jain, Alison Campion, and Sam Asher)

🧱

Residential Segregation in Urban India (with Anjali Adukia, Sam Asher, and Brandon Tan)

🐄

Predicting Poverty Using Daytime Imagery (with Tony Duan, Elliott Chartock, Haque Ishfaq, Sam Asher, Marshall Burke, David Lobell and Stefano Ermon)

🏃

The Cost of Distance: Geography and Governance in Rural India (with Sam Asher and Karan Nagpal)

💎

 Digging for Development: Economic Impacts of Mining Booms (with Sam Asher)

🚕

The Cost of Road Infrastructure in Tanzania (with Sam Asher and Martina Kirchberger)

🤑

Regulation Intensity, Rents and the Sectoral Concentration of Wealth (with Sam Asher and Michael Walton)

Working Papers on Hold

🗺

The Impacts of Local Control over Political Institutions: Evidence from State Splitting in India (with Sam Asher)

Retired Working Papers

➰

Getting Signal from Interval Data: Theory and Applications to Mortality and Intergenerational Mobility (with Sam Asher and Charlie Rafkin)
→ This methods paper has been integrated into the mortality and mobility papers above and retired.