I am a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of India, University of Pennsylvania. I completed a PhD in political science at Yale University. I study democratic accountability and the political economy of development, with a regional focus on South Asia. One line of my research looks at variation in how developing democracies deliver welfare to their citizens, and why governments do not entirely shift to more efficient delivery strategies. A second strand seeks to explain why decentralization often fails to deliver expected improvements in public goods provision, local state capacity, and political responsiveness. I employ a mixed-methods approach to study these questions, using experiments, observational analyses, and extensive fieldwork. I have work forthcoming in the American Political Science Review. I have taught a wide range of quantitative methods and comparative politics courses. In 2020, I received a university-wide award, the Prize Teaching Fellowship, for excellence in teaching. I have been closely involved with the Metaketa II project as a research assistant to the steering committee. Prior to the PhD, I fielded and analyzed surveys for India’s Congress party in its election war-room.
My research has been supported by Penn Global’s India Research and Engagement Fund, the MacMillan Center’s South Asian Studies Council, the Leitner Program in International and Comparative Political Economy, and the Institution for Social and Policy Studies.
Student evaluation
Visualization of Political and Social Data , Fall 2021, Undergraduate
Student evaluation
Advanced Quantitative Methods, Fall 2019, Graduate
Student evaluation
Design and Analysis of Field Experiments, Spring 2018, Graduate
This course uses Field Experiments: Design, Analysis, and Interpretation (by Alan Gerber and Donald Green) as a textbook, covering one chapter each week.
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