I am currently a fourth-year Economics PhD student at the University of Southern California.
My research agenda focuses on how to alleviate frictions in allocating people, land and opportunity in developing countries. I combine modern, large-scale administrative and satellite data with frontier econometric methods to look at the effects of upzoning in India’s national capital, spillovers from turnover of frontline bureaucrats in India’s villages, changes in land ownership patterns due to inheritance reforms and how service disruptions affect early childhood development in the US.
Before starting my PhD, I was a Predoctoral Research Fellow at Development Data Lab, where I worked on SHRUG 2.0, a comprehensive, high-resolution open data platform for India, combining massive administrative and remote-sensing data over 30 years. I also worked with a project management team to guide the development of the National Data and Analytics Platform, which harmonizes administrative datasets across time and space to ensure that Indian administrative data is truly publicly accessible.
Publications
COVID mortality in India: National survey data and health facility deaths (Science, 2022)
(with Paul Novosad, Aditi Bhowmick, Prabhat Jha, Chinmay Tumbe, Yashwant Deshmukh, Wilson Suraweera, Sze Hang Fu, Leslie Newcombe, Hellen Gelband, Patrick Brown)
Abstract
India’s national COVID death totals remain undetermined. Using an independent nationally representative survey of 0.14 million (M) adults, we compared COVID mortality during the 2020 and 2021 viral waves to expected all-cause mortality. COVID constituted 29% (95%CI 28-31%) of deaths from June 2020-July 2021, corresponding to 3.2M (3.1-3.4) deaths, of which 2.7M (2.6-2.9) occurred in April-July 2021 (when COVID doubled all-cause mortality). A sub-survey of 57,000 adults showed similar temporal increases in mortality with COVID and non-COVID deaths peaking similarly. Two government data sources found that, when compared to pre-pandemic periods, all-cause mortality was 27% (23-32%) higher in 0.2M health facilities and 26% (21-31%) higher in civil registration deaths in ten states; both increases occurred mostly in 2021. The analyses find that India’s cumulative COVID deaths by September 2021 were 6-7 times higher than reported officially.
Work-in-Progress
- The Missing Skyline: Causal Evidence on Upzoning from India’s National Capital
- Rural Housing and Local Economic Development
- Short-and Medium-Term Effects of COVID on Developmental Screening Results of Infants and Toddlers in Low-Income Families in the US (with Maria Prados, Dorian Traube and Allison Kemner)
- Distance and Government Performance (with Jeff Weaver)
- Inheritance and Culture: Legal Reform and Women’s Land Ownership (with Prerna Kundu)
Seminar Presentations
2026: World Bank Land and Property Research Conference; Urban Economics Association Summer School
2025: Annual Conference on Economic Growth and Development (ISI Delhi); BREW-ESA India Meeting (MDI Gurgaon)
2022: Asian Economic Development Conference (Asian Development Bank)
2021: Annual Conference on Economic Growth and Development (ISI Delhi); Winter School (Delhi School of Economics); Empirical Issues in Trade and Finance (IIFT Kolkata); Annual Conference on Economics and Public Policy (Jindal School of Government and Public Policy)