1. Effect of social information on competition choice with Lata Gangadharan, Anand Kumar and Srinivasan Murali
One liner: Social information about peers' competition choices strategically influences individuals' willingness to compete—observing lower competition rates among others increases one's own likelihood to compete based on beliefs about average ability, with this peer effect being particularly strong for women and substantially reducing the gender gap in competitive behavior.
2. Affirmative Action and Application Strategies: Evidence from Field Experiments in Colombia with Marcela Ibanez, Gerhard Reiner and Soham Sahoo
One liner: While affirmative-action signals successfully encourage women to invest more effort and express greater emotion in job applications, these signals paradoxically alter women's self-presentation in ways that reduce their attractiveness to both human and AI evaluators, revealing a fundamental tension between motivating applicant participation and achieving favorable evaluation outcomes in recruitment.
1. Caste Identity and Teachers' Biased Expectations: Evidence from Bihar, India, with Satarupa Mitra, Soham Sahoo and Ashmita Gupta. Journal of Development Economics, February 2026.
Published Version | SSRN Working Paper | AI-gen video summary: English | Bengali | Hindi | Media: The Indian Express, The Hindu
One liner: Teachers' evaluation bias, the difference between students' test-based rank and the teacher's perceived rating, is higher for backward caste students when taught by forward caste teachers.
2. Using social recognition to address the gender Using social recognition difference in volunteering for low promotability tasks with Priyoma Mustafi. Management Science, Forthcoming.
One liner: Women volunteer more for low-promotability tasks than men, but this gender gap disappears when people are rewarded with social recognition.
3. Do workers discriminate against their out-group employers? Evidence from an online labor market with Sher Afghan Asad and Joydeep Bhattacharya. Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, December 2023.
One liner: Using an online experiment in the US, we find white workers discriminate against black employers, in terms of effort, due to reciprocity.
4. Exponential Growth Bias in the Prediction of COVID-19 Spread and Economic Expectation with Priyama Majumdar. Economica, March 2023.
One liner: Correcting exponential growth bias—through feedback, stepwise prediction, or model-based forecasts—helps people better understand COVID‑19 case growth, which in turn tempers their risky investment choices and moderates overly optimistic macroeconomic expectations.
5. Anti-Tax Evasion, Anti-Corruption and Public Good Provision: An Experimental Analysis of Policy Spillovers with Amadou Boly and Robert Gillanders. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, May 2022.
One liner: Corruption and tax evasion reinforce each other, and while anti‑corruption enforcement sharply reduces both evasion and public‑goods losses, auditing citizens alone is far less effective—making anti‑corruption efforts the more powerful policy lever.
6. Just another cost of doing business? Experimental Evidence of a Lack of Distaste for Corruption with Amadou Boly, Robert Gillanders. Public Choice, 2021.
One liner: Participants in a lab experiment view corruption as a cost of doing business.
7. Exponential-growth prediction bias and compliance with safety measures in the times of COVID-19 with Priyama Majumdar and Joydeep Bhattacharya. Social Science and Medicine, 2020. [Media Coverage: BBC]
One liner: Participants in a lab experiment view corruption as a cost of doing business.
8. Feedback Spillovers Across Tasks, Self-Confidence and Competitiveness with Nabanita Datta Gupta and Marie Claire Villeval. Games and Economic Behavior, vol(123): 127:170, 2020.
One liner: An online MTurk experiment reveals that bias in predicting future COVID-19 cases is negatively associated with non-compliance with WHO safety measures and is higher in countries at later stages of disease progression, but can be causally reduced by presenting prior data through raw numbers rather than graphs.
9. On the interpretation of World Values Survey trust question – global expectations vs. local beliefs. European Journal of Political Economy, vol(55): 491-510, 2018.
One liner: An incentivized Trust Game experiment in India demonstrates that the World Values Survey trust question effectively captures stable beliefs about general trustworthiness in society, but fails to detect immediate fluctuations in trust beliefs following negative experiences, suggesting that survey-based methods are inadequate for measuring beliefs induced by short-term psychological perturbations.
10. On monetary and non-monetary interventions to combat corruption with Arnab Mitra. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, vol 149, 332-355, 2018.
One liner: An incentivized Trust Game experiment in India demonstrates that the World Values Survey trust question effectively captures stable beliefs about general trustworthiness in society, but fails to detect immediate fluctuations in trust beliefs following negative experiences, suggesting that survey-based methods are inadequate for measuring beliefs induced by short-term psychological perturbations.
11. The spillover effects of affirmative action on competitiveness and unethical behavior, with Nabanita Datta Gupta and Marie Claire Villeval. European Economic Review, vol 101, 567-604, 2018.
One liner: An artefactual field experiment in India reveals that while Affirmative Action policies substantially increase backward caste members' competitiveness and beliefs about winning during implementation, these effects disappear once the policy is withdrawn, and the policy does not significantly increase discrimination by the dominant caste against backward castes except when individuals learn they have lost a competition.
12. Corruption, Norm Violation and the Decay in Social Capital, Journal of Public Economics, Vol 137, 14-27, May 2016.
Published Version | Supplementary Online Material | IZA Discussion Paper # 9859 | Slides
One liner: A lab experiment shows that corruption negatively spills over to reduce trust by lowering expected returns on trust, with this effect strengthening as bribe demands become less socially appropriate, and reveals that violations of social appropriateness norms erode trust through adverse effects on beliefs about trustworthiness in both corruption and neutral bargaining contexts.
13. On the Interpretation of bribery in laboratory corruption games: moral frames and social norms”, Experimental Economics, vol 19(1), pages 240-267, March 2016.
Published Version | Supplementary Materials (Including Instructions) | Working Paper
One liner: Laboratory corruption games do capture moral costs: bribery framing reduces corrupt behavior compared to strategically identical neutral games by altering entitlement and social appropriateness norms, not merely through language.
14. Awareness programs and change in taste-based caste prejudice, with Nabanita Datta Gupta. PLoS One 10(4): e0118546. April 2015.
One liner: A TV social program reduces implicit caste prejudice among management students, particularly for those at the margin of the prejudice distribution who would affect employment outcomes as predicted by Becker's theory of taste-based discrimination, and increases support for job reservations for lower castes.
15. Self selection of the corrupt into the public sector with Tushi Baul and Tanya Rosenblat. Economics Letters, vol 127, Pages 43-46, February 2015.
Published Version | Supplementary Material (Including Instructions)|Working paper | Slides
One liner: Aspirant bureaucrats engage in more embezzlement than private sector job aspirants in an experimental corruption game, but the likelihood of being corrupt is the same across both sectors, suggesting corruption differences arise from context rather than self-selection.
16. Linking Teacher and Student Absenteeism – The Role of shared goods in reducing Absenteeism with Elizabeth M. King, Peter Orazem, Elizabeth M. Paterno. Economics of Education Review, vol. 31(5), pages 563-574, 2012.
One liner: Using data from Pakistan, this study shows that teacher and student attendance are mutually reinforcing—each being the strongest predictor of the other—suggesting that policies to reduce teacher absenteeism should focus on raising student attendance.
"Stopping the Rot I: A Review of Models and Experimental Methods of Corruption Experiments" with Utteeyo Dasgupta and Satarupa Mitra. The Political Economy of Corruption – Emerging Issues. (eds) CK Jha, Sudipta Sarangi and AK Mishra. Rouledge, Forthcoming. Published Version.
"Stopping the Rot II: Consequences, Causes and Policy Lessons from the Recent Experiments on Corruption" with Utteeyo Dasgupta and Satarupa Mitra. The Political Economy of Corruption – Emerging Issues. (eds) CK Jha, Sudipta Sarangi and AK Mishra. Rouledge, Forthcoming. Published Version.
“Beyond Headline GDP Growth – Trends in Income and Consumption Inequality” with Prerana Maheshwari. Economic and Political Weekly, 2020. Published Version | Ungated Version
“Predicting food price inflation through online prices in India”, with Nished Singhal and Chetan Subramanian. Economic and Political Weekly, 2018. Published Version | Media Coverage: Mint, Commentary in HT
“Social Norms regarding bribing in India: An experimental analysis” with Tushi Baul and Tanya Rosenblat, Journal of Contextual Economics, 2016. Published Version
“An evaluation of the revenue side as a source of fiscal consolidation in high debt economies” Journal of Economic Studies, 2014. Published Version | Working Paper
Predicting inflation through online prices with Nished Singhal, Chetan Subramanian, Menaka Rao. Harvard Business Publishing, 2019.