• “Learning in Networks with Idiosyncratic Agents” (Games and Economic Behaviour, 2024) Twitter thread 

Individuals update their beliefs and respond to new information in idiosyncratic ways. I show that an individual’s idiosyncrasies such as under-reaction, over-reaction, or frustration can have spillover effects and adversely affect the long run beliefs of society. I derive sufficient conditions for convergence of beliefs for all possible networks of agents with heterogeneous idiosyncrasies. Beliefs converge if the magnitude of over-reaction and frustration in any agent's network neighbourhood is below a threshold determined by how much they trust their own private signals. I find that the absence of disproportionately influential agents is not sufficient to ensure the accuracy of long-run beliefs if learning idiosyncrasies also grow with the network. Finally, I show that agent under-reaction can partition the network, create bottlenecks, and delay convergence. Simulations on artificial and Indian village networks validate the results.

• "Silent Networks: The Role of Inaccurate Beliefs in Reducing Useful Social Interactions" with Ronak Jain 

2023 Econ Job Market Best Paper Award by the UniCredit Foundation and European Economic Association.

Coverage: VoxDev (2025), VoxDev (2024),  Ideas of India Podcast at the Mercatus Centre. Spotify Link. 

Inaccurate beliefs about social norms can reduce useful social interactions and adversely affect an individual’s ability to deal with negative shocks. We implement a randomized controlled trial with low-income workers in urban India who lack access to formal financial and healthcare support. We find that the majority of individuals underestimate their community’s willingness to engage in dialogue around financial and mental health concerns. Belief correction leads to a large increase in the demand for network-based assistance. We show that the effects are driven by a reduction in the perceived costs of violating social norms arising due to concerns around reputation and insensitivity. We structurally estimate a network diffusion model and predict that our belief correction intervention will not lead to a shift in equilibrium engagement. Consistent with this, 2 years later, we find that the average beliefs of those exposed to the intervention are significantly more optimistic but still lower than the information delivered in the experiment. We compute the strength of counterfactual interventions needed to generate a sustained effect and find that belief correction can be used to generate both the demand and funding for such policies.

Presentations: (2024) Workshop on Networks and Development, Naples; CSAE Conference, Oxford; PacDev, Stanford. (2023) European Winter Meeting of the Econometric Society, Manchester; NEUDC, Harvard; CEPR-TCD TIME Conference on Economic Development, Trinity College Dublin; OxDev, Oxford ; CSAE Research Workshop, Oxford; Informal Presentation at the King Center of Global Development, Stanford; Presentation to the Communities Project Team, Stanford; Interface of Theory and Experiments at the Economics Research Jamboree, Oxford. 

• "Great Expectations? Experimental Evidence from Schools in Pakistan'' with Minahil Asim and Ronak Jain  

Funded by JPAL Post Primary Education Grant (see JPAL Project Page), and RISE.  Coverage: VoxDev

We study the effect of communicating student-specific teacher expectations on academic performance. We randomize whether students (a) receive high-performance expectations, (b) are additionally paired with a classmate for encouragement, (c) receive information about past performance, or (d) receive no message. Expectations increase math scores by 0.19 standard deviations, with especially large effects among students who randomly received ambitious expectations and were predicted to perform poorly. Information provision has comparably large effects (0.16 standard deviations), particularly in schools with low parental literacy. However, pairing students only improves scores when peers have similar characteristics. Our findings highlight low-cost, sustainable ways of leveraging teachers to improve performance. 

• “Spatial Inequality and Informality in Kenya’s Firm Network"  with Verena Wiedemann, Peter Wankuru Chacha, and Benard Kipyegon Kirui World Bank Working Paper  

The spatial configuration of domestic supply chains plays a crucial role in the transmission of shocks. This paper investigates the representativeness of formal firm-to-firm trade data in capturing overall domestic trade patterns in Kenya — a context with a high prevalence of informal economic activity. We first document a series of stylized facts and show that informal economic activity is not randomly distributed across space and sectors, with a higher incidence of informality in downstream sectors and smaller regional markets. We then link granular transaction-level data on formal firms with data on informal economic activity to estimate a structural model and predict a counterfactual network that accounts for informal firms. We find that formal sector data overstates the spatial concentration of aggregate trade flows and under accounts for trade within regions and across regions with stronger social ties. Additionally, the higher the informality in a sector and region, the more we underestimate its vulnerability to domestic output shocks and overestimate its vulnerability to import shocks.

• "The Value of Strategic Networking" with Juni Singh (Updated draft coming soon!) 

How important is it to network strategically? We implement a RCT in rural Nepal to study the effects of entrepreneurship training and contact-sharing among women who differ in terms of their closeness and connectedness in their social network. The intervention improves short-term outcomes when individuals are paired with a more connected, socially close peer and long-term outcomes when paired with a less connected, socially close peer. These peer effects arise due to motivation in the short term and ease of collaboration in the long term. Counterfactual exercises show that interacting strategically can improve outcomes by 0.8-1.1 standard deviations compared to random interactions.

• "Parental Involvement in Education and Children’s Human Capital Formation" with Sonya Krutikova, Abu Siddique, Michael Vlassopoulos and Yves Zenou. (Fieldwork Ongoing)

• "Social Learning through Meal Sharing" with Juni Singh. (Fieldwork Ongoing)

• "Impact of a Government-led Mental Health Intervention on Teaching Practices and Student Outcomes" (Fieldwork Ongoing)

• "Social Networks, Mental Health, and Domestic Violence" with Sonia Bhalotra and Manuela Angelucci.

• "Mask Up! How Social Networks affect Adoption of Public Health Behaviours and Norms" with Dennis Egger, Aleksandra Jakubowski, and Michael Walker.

• "The Costs of Exploration: How does Access to Potential Suppliers affect Firm Performance?" with Diana Beltekian.