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. Together with schools and other partners, we are now working to make scholarship information easy for low-income and rural students to find, and to put good mock tests and feedback within reach of students who cannot afford coaching.
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.