Anand Shrivastava

Research & Publications

Research Interests

A major focus of my work continues to be India's labour market. This is largely centred on my contributions to the State of Working India reports, which cover formal and informal employment, wage dynamics, gender and caste-based occupational segregation. With Girish Bahal I have studied the mechanics of public workfare programmes such as MGNREGA, specifically the consequences of supply-side volatility in these programmes, and with Rosa Abraham have systematically evaluated the comparability of India's major employment surveys. In ongoing projects, I am looking at sampling stratification in labour surveys in India and at the pipeline into labour markets through institutions of higher education. Alongside this research, I have written about India's employment and wages, on the impact of demonetisation on young workers, and on the case for an urban employment guarantee in The India Forum.

A growing strand of my work examines the role of social and economic networks. With Sai Madhurika Mamunuru and Arjun Jayadev, I have studied how social network structure shapes the inequality that individuals actually experience, and how network properties can either amplify or dampen perceived inequality for a given wealth distribution. In ongoing projects, with Girish Bahal, I am studying how firm-level shocks propagate through production networks, and how caste-based networks mediate access to credit and labour market outcomes.

A central strand of my work concerns the intersection of economics with questions of history, religion and politics. In earlier work with Sriya Iyer I have shown how religious riots shape voting behaviour across Indian constituencies. With Sriya Iyer, Latika Chaudhary, and Jared Rubin I have examined how colonial-era religious institutions leave lasting imprints on public trust, and more recent work looks at how religiosity ameliorated the mental-health consequences of Covid-19 in the US, and at how economic shocks historically triggered episodes of temple desecration in medieval India. I have written about electoral riots (see an op-ed and an interview) and on the Maoist insurgency for Ideas for India.

Ongoing Projects

View working papers and publications

Public Writing