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 and environmental challenges.

Research Highlights

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. This work was published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics (2025).

Job Market Paper

My job market paper studies whether spouses successfully coordinate risk-taking decisions within the household. Using a lab-in-field experiment with married couples in Bangladesh, I show that most individuals hold mistaken beliefs about their spouse’s risk preferences, leading nearly half of participants to either accept excessively risky choices or forgo profitable opportunities under imperfect information. These coordination failures are larger when one spouse actively counters the other’s choice, a behavior more commonly exhibited by men, causing household risk profiles to disproportionately reflect men’s preferences. Variation in non-cognitive skills helps explain this behavior, with personality traits systematically predicting whether spouses accommodate or counter their partner’s choices. Further when one spouse exhibits the tendency to counter, the other usually mirrors it, compounding coordination failure within the household. Linking experimental behavior to household data, I show that coordination errors predict asymmetric information about savings, assets, and loans, and significantly increase the likelihood that households are unable to cope with adverse shocks without selling productive assets or resorting to migration.

Second Doctoral Essay

My second doctoral essay examines whether large-scale public works programs targeted at rural women can offset declines in female labor force participation driven by structural transformation. Exploiting the staggered rollout of India’s National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) and district-level variation in soil texture that predicts agricultural mechanization, I show that NREGS did not mitigate women’s exit from the labor force induced by mechanization. Instead, declines in women’s participation are larger in NREGS districts than in non-NREGS districts, with minimal offsetting effects on days worked at the intensive margin. These findings highlight the limits of public works programs in counteracting gender-biased labor market impacts of technological change.

Current Research at AUS

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. At AUS, my research focuses on how cultural beliefs shape cooperation in shared-resource environments. I co-lead field projects among Rabari and non-Rabari livestock herders near the Jawai Bandh leopard sanctuary in Rajasthan, India, using lab-in-field experiments to study pro-conservation behavior.

One ongoing project uses a discrete choice experiment to estimate herders’ welfare valuations for leopard conservation relative to compensation for livestock predation losses. Preliminary results suggest that indigenous herders hold stronger pro-conservation beliefs than non-indigenous herders, and that these beliefs partially offset the monetary losses associated with predation.

Building on this work, I have secured grant funding for a new project that will employ a novel ambiguity-preference elicitation design to study tolerance for predation-related uncertainty. This design allows comparisons of uncertainty preferences across social groups and sources of uncertainty, enabling tests of how familiarity and cultural identity shape risk perceptions and investment decisions. Fieldwork for this project is scheduled to begin in March 2026.