Rikhil R. Bhavnani

Assistant Professor of Political Science

University of Wisconsin, Madison

 

 

Description: Description: Description: Description: Description: Description: Description: Description: Description: Description: Description: Description: Description: Description: Description: Description: Description: Description: Description: Description: Description: Description: Description: Description: Description: Description: rrbpage2Welcome.  I am an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.  I received a PhD in political science from Stanford University in September 2010, and an MA in economics in 2008.  My research and teaching focus on inequalities in political representation and corruption among politicians, particularly in South Asia. Other projects examine the effects of migration on political participation and violence in India, the role of the Great Depression in helping India, Pakistan and Bangladesh secure their political independence, the selection and impact of leaders, and the effects of foreign aid on economic growth. My research is characterized by a close attention to causality, by interests in political and economic development, and has been published in the American Political Science Review and is forthcoming in The Economic Journal.  Prior to starting at Wisconsin, I was a visiting fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University.  I have previously worked at the Center for Global Development and the International Monetary Fund.  Research outputs are listed below.  Here is my CV, and my Google Scholar page.  Thank you for visiting.

 

 

Peer-Reviewed Publications

·         Counting Chickens When They Hatch: Timing and the Effects of Aid on Growth, with Samuel Bazzi, Michael Clemens and Steven Radelet, The Economic Journal, forthcoming.  A previous version of the paper was issued as Center for Global Development Working Paper 44, July 2004, and was referenced in a Washington Post editorial.

·         Do Electoral Quotas Work After They Are Withdrawn?  Evidence from a Natural Experiment in India, American Political Science Review 103 (1):23-35, 2009.  Here are the replication data and code, articles on the paper in the Indian Express and the Times of India, and mentions on a New York Times blog, Chris Blattman’s blog and in the Hindustan Times.

 

Other Publications

·         Secondary Analyses of Experiments: Opportunities and Challenges, with Kate Baldwin, APSA-Comparative Democratization Newsletter, October 2011.

·         Aid and Growth: The Current Debate and Some New Evidence, with Steven Radelet and Michael Clemens in The Macroeconomic Management of Foreign Aid edited by Peter Isard and others, 2006 (Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund).

·         Aid and Growth, with Michael Clemens and Steven Radelet, Finance and Development 42 (3), September 2005.  Reprinted in Annual Editions: Developing World 07/08, edited by Robert J. Griffiths, November 2006 (Columbus, OH: McGraw-Hill). 

 

In-Progress

·         Using Asset Disclosures to Study Politicians’ Rents: An Application to India.

·         The Effects of Malapportionment in Parliamentary Systems: Subnational Evidence from India.

·         A Primer on Voter Discrimination Against India’s Lower Caste Politicians: Evidence from Observational Data and Survey Experiments.

·         What Have the Lasting Effects of Electoral Quotas for Lower Castes Been? Evidence from a Natural Experiment in India.

·         Trade Shocks, Mass Mobilization and Decolonization:  Evidence from India's Independence Struggle, with Saumitra Jha.

·         Migration, Politics and Public Goods: Evidence Using New Data from Kerala, with Maggie Peters.

·         The Effects of Exogenous Shocks to Migration on Violence in India, with Bethany Lacina.

·         Leadership and Development: Education, Embeddedness and the Performance of Indian Bureaucrats, with Alexander Lee.

 

Dormant

·         A Microeconomic View of the Evolution of Poverty and Inequality in Ghana, 1967-1997 with Markus Goldstein.

·         The Missing Globalization Puzzle with Arvind Subramanian, Natalia Tamirisa, and David Coe, International Monetary Fund Working Paper WP/02/171, October 2002.

 

Software

·         RB-AMIN.exe: A Tool to “Fuzzy” Match Indian Names.