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About Me

I'm a first-year PhD candidate in Political Economy and Government, affiliated with the Harvard Department of Economics and Harvard Kennedy School. Prior to graduate school I worked as a pre-doctoral research fellow with the Princeton Program in Public Finance. I hold an MSc in Economics from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a BA in Economics from St. Stephen's College, New Delhi. Thanks to the generous support of the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School,  I will spend the summer before my second year working as a research assistant for Professor Rema Hanna at HKS. 

About the Project

This summer I will be working with Professor Rema Hanna, helping to lay the groundwork for an impact evaluation of the Samurdhi Housing Lottery in Sri Lanka. Samurdhi is the main poverty alleviation program run by the Sri Lankan government, covering 35-40% of the population. Since 2002, Samurdhi has been conducting a lottery under which approximately 34,000 beneficiaries have been awarded funds to date for purchasing land or building a house. The research project will examine the effects of the housing transfer on living standards, investments in productive and human capital, and subsequent take-up of welfare programs, and to explore whether these large one-time transfers helped to reduce gender gaps in earnings and labor force participation. The initial stages of the project will involve working with the World Bank and Sri Lankan government to better understand data availability, piloting the administrative data compilation, and piloting survey enumeration in a limited area to assess the feasibility of the study.

Image by Alex Azabache
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