About me

Welcome to my personal page! I am an agricultural economist specializing in issues related to international development and conservation. I use field experiments to study how social norms and culture shape behavioral responses to development challenges.

I am currently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the American University of Sharjah (AUS) and defended my Ph.D. in Agricultural Economics at Purdue University in 2025. My job market paper shows that spouses make systematic errors in coordinating risk-taking decisions in the household. A lab-in-field experiment with married couples in Bangladesh demonstrates that under imperfect information about a spouse’s risk-taking behavior, nearly half of all participants either accept excessively risky lotteries or sacrifice profitable opportunities out of over-caution. Using household data, I further show that risk preferences, and importantly the prediction errors spouses make about each other, are associated with children’s education outcomes, ownership of assets, and mistaken beliefs about the partner’s assets.

At AUS, my research examines how indigenous culture and belief systems shape pro-conservation behavior, including how people perceive the likelihood of uncertain predation losses.

A joint work with Kajal Gulati and Travis J. Lybbert received the Uma Lele Prize for Best Contributed Paper in Gender at the Interantional Conference for Agricultural Economists 2024. Using machine learning algorithms alongside traditional causal inference techniques, it documents productivity gap between households associated with the use of hired versus family female labor.