I am an assistant 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.

Publications

🚛 Rural Roads and Local Economic Development (with Sam Asher)
forthcoming at American Economic Review

📖 Educational Investment Responses to Economic Opportunity: Evidence from Indian Road Construction (with Anjali Adukia and Sam Asher)
Forthcoming at AEJ: Applied

🌲 The Ecological Footprint of Transportation Infrastructure (with Sam Asher and Teevrat Garg)
Forthcoming at the Economic Journal

🇸🇪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.

Working Papers

☝ Intergenerational Mobility in India: Estimates from New Methods and Administrative Data (with Sam Asher and Charlie Rafkin)
→ Fact Sheet for media.
→ All-India mobility map.
→ Interactive Delhi mobility map.

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

➰ Getting Signal from Interval Data: Theory and Applications to Mortality and Intergenerational Mobility (with Sam Asher and Charlie Rafkin) (submitted)
→ Code for generating ANR Bounds and paper replication: anr-bounds

💀 Mortality Change Among Less Educated Americans (with Charlie Rafkin) (submitted)

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

Work in Progress

🐄 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)

Permanent Working Papers

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

Econ 24

You can find a copy of the Econ 24 syllabus (from the current or previous quarter) here.