Anand Shrivastava

A central strand of my work concerns the economics of conflict — what causes communal violence and civil war, and how these episodes shape economic outcomes. My doctoral dissertation examined riots and public finance in India, and subsequent work studies how the Maoist insurgency responds to changes in wages and state capacity. I am also interested in how religious identity fuels electoral mobilisation and shapes voting behaviour across Indian constituencies, research that has appeared in the Journal of Development Economics.

Questions of identity — religion, caste, and colonial culture — run through much of my research. With Sriya Iyer, Lakshmi Chaudhary, and Jared Rubin I have examined how colonial-era religious institutions leave lasting imprints on public-goods provision and cooperative behaviour (Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization). More recent work investigates the mental-health consequences of Covid-19 across religious groups in India (European Economic Review, 2023), and how economic shocks historically triggered episodes of temple desecration in medieval India.

A second major focus is India's labour market. I study formal and informal employment, wage dynamics, gender and caste-based occupational segregation, and the mechanics of public workfare programmes such as MGNREGA. Work with Rosa Abraham has systematically evaluated the comparability of India's major employment surveys — a methodological contribution that undergirds the annual State of Working India reports produced by the Centre for Sustainable Employment at Azim Premji University.

I am also interested in the fiscal dimensions of development. With Girish Bahal, I have studied how intergovernmental transfers drive inflationary pressure in Indian states (Empirical Economics) and how supply-side volatility in public works programmes affects beneficiary households (Journal of Development Economics). Ongoing work examines how production-network linkages propagate firm-level shocks through the broader economy.

Across all these areas I rely on structural modelling, quasi-experimental identification, and large-scale administrative and survey data. I am engaged in building better data infrastructure for Indian labour-market research — including the India Working Survey, a nationally representative panel — and I teach quantitative and computational methods to undergraduate and postgraduate students at Azim Premji University.