Upcoming Sessions
Dates are to be confirmed.
Have a suggestion for a session topic? Email career-dev@idea.devecon.org.
Coordinators
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Bhanu Gupta
Assistant Professor of Economics, Ashoka UniversityBhanu Gupta is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Ashoka University. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 2020. His research examines tax policy in developing countries, with a focus on optimal design and enforcement. He has collaborated with both central and state governments in India on policy-relevant research in direct and indirect taxation. His other work explored frictions in human capital formation and how firms respond to regulatory changes.
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Aarushi Kalra
Associate Professor of Economics, University of OxfordAarushi Kalra is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Oxford, jointly appointed with Worcester College. She studies digital economies and AI in under-regulated environments. Her research examines how social identity drives exclusion both online and offline. She is also a co-founder of Bahujan Economists, a platform for social science researchers from historically marginalized castes and communities in India.
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Eeshani Kandpal
Senior Fellow, Center for Global DevelopmentEeshani Kandpal is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development. Her research informs development policy to improve maternal and child outcomes, focusing on the design and impacts of cash transfers to poor households, pay-for-performance contracts to improve health worker effort and maternal and child health care, and household-level determinants of investment in women's human capital. She previously served as a Senior Economist in the Development Research Group of the World Bank. She is an Adjunct Lecturer at SAIS, Johns Hopkins University, and has also taught at Georgetown University's McCourt School of Public Policy. Eeshani supports a number of professional diversity efforts, including through AMIE and Research in Color mentoring efforts, and the International Health Economics Association's equity, diversity, and inclusion committee. She holds a PhD in Applied Economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a BA in Economics and Classics from Macalester College.
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Mahesh Karra
Associate Professor of Population and Family Health, Columbia UniversityMahesh Karra is an Associate Professor of Population and Family Health at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and the founding Director of the Program on Women’s Empowerment Research (POWER). Prior to joining Columbia in 2025, he was a tenured Associate Professor of Global Development Policy at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University and the founding Associate Director of the Human Capital Initiative (HCI) at the BU Global Development Policy (GDP) Center. He was also an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the University of Göttingen’s Center for Modern Indian Studies from 2024-2025. His academic and research interests are broadly in development economics, health economics, quantitative methods, and applied demography. His research utilizes experimental and non-experimental methods to investigate the relationships between population, health, and economic development in low- and middle-income countries. He has conducted field work in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, and his current research uses randomized controlled trials to evaluate the health and economic effects of improving access to family planning and maternal and child health services. He has also worked for the Population Reference Bureau and the Futures Group International and served as a consultant to the World Bank, the World Health Organization, and the Population Council. He is also a Co-Editor of Studies in Family Planning, a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal that publishes articles on public health, social science, and biomedical research on sexual and reproductive health, fertility, and family planning. He received a B.A. in Economics and Hispanic Studies (Joint Honours) from McGill University, an M.Sc. in Economics from the Barcelona Graduate School of Economics, and an Sc.D. in Global Health Economics from Harvard University.
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Kanika Mahajan
Associate Professor of Economics, Ashoka UniversityKanika Mahajan is an Associate Professor of Economics at Ashoka University, India, with research interests in labor, trade and development economics. She studies how policies shape employment outcomes across demographic groups and education-to-employment pathways, and how trade and other policies affect firm growth, resilience and labor demand. As part of her current research agenda on gender and labor, she studies the factors underlying low female employment rates in India, exploring both supply-side and demand-side linkages using data from digital platforms as well as primary and secondary individual and firm-level data. Her ongoing research on firms examines factors that influence their growth and resilience in India, and the implications of these dynamics for labor, capital, and trade in the economy.
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Silvia Prina
Professor of Economics, Northeastern UniversitySilvia Prina is a Professor in the department of Economics at Northeastern University. She is a development economist whose research focuses on understanding the behavior of the poor for the purpose of uncovering potential strategies to improve their lives. Her research interests are centered on financial access, networks and spillover effects. The bulk of her work uses field experiments and rigorous empirical methods to study the impact of financial access on the welfare and decision making of the poor. Her research highlights the role of networks and peers in shaping economic decisions and develops new empirical methods in this context. Professor Prina is Co-Editor of Labour Economics and an Associate Editor of the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. She is an Affiliate of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), a Faculty Affiliate of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action (J-PAL), a Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), a Research Affiliate at Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), an Invited Researcher at J-PAL for the Inclusive Financial Innovation Initiative, and a Faculty Scholar at the Institute for Health Equity and Social Justice Research. She holds a PhD in Economics from Boston University. Prior to joining Northeastern in 2018, Professor Prina held positions as Associate and Assistant Professor of Economics at Case Western Reserve University and as Research Scholar at the InterAmerican Development Bank.
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Soham Sahoo
Associate Professor, Public Policy Area, IIM BangaloreSoham Sahoo is an Associate Professor and Chairperson of the Public Policy Area at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore. His research focuses on education, labour, health, and political economy. He received his PhD in Quantitative Economics from the Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi, is affiliated with IZA and J-PAL, and serves as an Associate Editor at Economics of Education Review.
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Abhijeet Singh
Associate Professor of Economics, Stockholm School of EconomicsAbhijeet Singh is an Associate Professor in Economics at the Stockholm School of Economics and global co-Chair of the Education Sector at JPAL. His research focuses on topics relating to education systems and public service delivery in low- and middle-income countries and has appeared in leading journals including the American Economic Review, the Journal of the European Economic Association, the Economic Journal, the Journal of Public Economics, the Journal of Development Economics and Science. He is affiliated with prominent professional associations including CEPR, BREAD, EUDN and the Centre for Global Development. He holds a doctorate and an M.Sc. in Economics from the University of Oxford and a BA(Honours) degree from the University of Delhi.