Research

It started with my master's thesis. I evaluated India's National Clean Air Programme, a big national plan to clean up the air in its cities, and found that it made no significant difference overall. In some regions the air even got worse. Not the result anyone hopes for, but working it out was the most rewarding stretch of my studies, and it is the reason I stayed in research.

It also left me with a nagging question. If the plan was sensible, what went wrong? My guess is that the technical fix matters less than who gets to enforce it. A regulator that depends on the politicians and industries it is supposed to watch will not watch very hard.

So that is the PhD. I want to know how political influence over environmental regulators shapes enforcement, which features of an institution protect it from that, and whether more independent regulators actually deliver cleaner air. The plan is to put satellite pollution data next to electoral and institutional data for India, and look at what happens to the air when the institutions change.

I like the econometrics more than I expected to, but I don't think this is only a numbers problem. Who breathes the dirty air, and who gets a say in fixing it, are questions of fairness too. That is why I'm glad to be in a program that puts economists in a room with philosophers and political scientists.