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Professor Specialization:
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My research career started in 1987 as a researcher on the economies of the South Asia region at the Institute of Developing Economies. I moved to the Institute of Economic Research here at Hitotsubashi University in 1997, where I have been conducting both theoretical and empirical work from a microeconomic perspective on questions of economic development in LDCs where absolute poverty is widespread. My research to date can be largely divided into two areas. The first area is modeling economic behavior under risk and the empirical application of these models in the context of rural communities in South Asia. More recently, I have tried to combine the analysis of poverty with the question of how to analyze the economic vulnerability of households. My second major research area is the empirical analysis of market development in low-income economies using historical statistics.
The area on which I am concentrating most of my efforts at the moment is empirical research based on field surveys conducted in Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. With regard to Pakistan, I am conducting research in several joint projects related to technology adoption under credit constraint, investment in children, natural disasters, community development, and political participation. As for India, I am analyzing the relation between the election system and pulic goods distribution, in addition to on-going surveys in north India on micro entrepreneurs and informal workers and in south India on child labor, credit constraints, and intrahousehold resource allocation. In Bangladesh, I am analyzing the results from randomized controlled trials to test new designs of microcredit schemes for the ultra poor. Apart from this, I am involved in research on the long-term growth process of agriculture in India and Pakistan.
◎Keywords
development microeconomics, microeconometrics, household models, poverty analysis, South Asian economies
