Rohini Pande


Rohini Pande is an American economist, who is currently the Mohammed Kamal Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard John F. Kennedy School of Government. Pande is the Co-Director of CID's and serves on the Board of Directors of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, MIT. She also serves on the board of the and the . She is a Faculty Research Associate at NBER, CEPR and the IFPRI. Her research focuses on the economic analysis of the politics and consequences of different forms of redistribution, principally in developing countries.

Early life and education

Pande was born to a public administrator father and a journalist mother and her sister is a doctor. She is a Rhodes Scholar and holds a Ph.D. as well as M.Sc. in Economics from the London School of Economics. Her other educational qualifications include a M.A. in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford University, and a B.A. in Economics from St. Stephens College, Delhi University.

Career

Pande is the Henry J. Heinz II Professor of Economics at Yale University. Until 2019, she was the Rafik Hariri Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard Kennedy School. She co-directs the Initiative. Prior to joining the Kennedy School, she was an Associate Professor of Economics at Yale University and has also taught at Yale University, MIT, and Columbia University.

Work

Pande's research work focuses on the economic costs and benefits of informal and formal institutions and the role of public policy in affecting change. Her work is focused in India, where she examines how institutions can be designed to empower historically disadvantaged groups; how low-cost improvements in information collection and dissemination can enable flexible regulation and more efficient outcomes in areas as diverse as environmental protection and elections; and how biased social norms, unless challenged by public policy, can worsen individual well-being and reduce economic efficiency.

Selected Works