I am a Visiting Assistant Professor at Bates College and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern University in Boston. I am an applied economist working in labor, health and urban economics.
I care about getting the numbers right on questions that shape people's lives: whether a higher minimum wage reaches the workers it is meant for, whether a public program is worth what it costs, what care costs for people who rely on the health safety net, and who actually gets the jobs a policy creates. The best evidence on these questions often sits in data that was never collected for research, and I enjoy the careful work of turning it into numbers that hold up and that people making decisions can use. My projects have taken me from Boston's summer jobs program for young people and fast-food restaurants in California to Medicaid in North Carolina, community health centers across the country, commuting across U.S. cities, and firms deciding where to place technical work as AI improves.
I was born in Faridabad, in the Haryana part of Delhi–NCR, and I care about making it a better place to grow up and learn. That is why I work with the Titiksha Foundation for Education, which is rooted in Faridabad and partners with schools to improve how students learn. Our work tries to reduce two gaps: between the students who qualify for a scholarship and those who ever hear about one, and between those who can pay for coaching and those who cannot.
I earned my PhD in Economics from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. I am also a Research Affiliate of the Global Labor Organization, NULab and the GAP Initiative at Northeastern.