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, wages, and occupational segregation by gender and caste, with the latest edition focusing on youth employment and the school-to-work transition. 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 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 how higher education feeds students into the labour market. 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.
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 the structure of a social network shapes the inequality people actually experience, so that the same distribution of wealth can feel more or less unequal depending on who is connected to whom. 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. More recent work looks at how religiosity ameliorated the mental-health consequences of Covid-19 in the US, and how economic shocks 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.