Rohini Somanathan (born 1965) [1] is an Indian economist focusing on political economy and development economics, and especially on public goods in India. Her research has included work on the conflation of caste with disadvantage as a legacy of colonialism in India, [2] and the effects of high temperatures on worker productivity. [3] She is a professor of economics at the Delhi School of Economics.
Somanathan graduated with honours in 1986 from Delhi University, and received a master's degree in economics in 1988 from the Delhi School of Economics. She went to Boston University in the US for doctoral study in economics, and received her Ph.D. in 1996. [4] Her dissertation, School Systems, Educational Attainment, and Wages, was jointly supervised by Debraj Ray and Glenn Loury. [5]
She was a lecturer at Delhi University in 1989–1990, and a visiting assistant professor at Emory University in the US from 1995 to 1998. She became a regular-rank assistant professor at the University of Michigan from 1998 to 2005, while also holding an assistant professorship at the Indian Statistical Institute from 2001 to 2004. She returned to the Delhi School of Economics as a reader in 2005, and has been a professor there since 2008. [4]
Somanathan was named as a Fellow of the International Economic Association in 2018, [6] and as a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 2021. [7]
James Joseph Heckman is an American economist and Nobel laureate who serves as the Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago, where he is also a professor at the College, a professor at the Harris School of Public Policy, Director of the Center for the Economics of Human Development (CEHD), and Co-Director of Human Capital and Economic Opportunity (HCEO) Global Working Group. He is also a professor of law at the Law School, a senior research fellow at the American Bar Foundation, and a research associate at the NBER. He received the John Bates Clark Medal in 1983, and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2000, which he shared with Daniel McFadden. He is known principally for his pioneering work in econometrics and microeconomics.
Joan Violet Robinson was a British economist known for her wide-ranging contributions to economic theory. One of the most prominent economists of the century, Robinson incarnated the "Cambridge School" in most of its guises in the 20th century. She started out as a Marshallian, became one of the earliest and most ardent Keynesians after 1936, and ended up as a leader of the neo-Ricardian and post-Keynesian schools.
Kaushik Basu is an Indian economist who was Chief Economist of the World Bank from 2012 to 2016 and Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India from 2009 to 2012. He is the C. Marks Professor of International Studies and Professor of Economics at Cornell University, and academic advisory board member of upcoming Plaksha University. He began a three-year term as President of the International Economic Association in June 2017. From 2009 to 2012, during the United Progressive Alliance's second term, Basu served as the Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India. Basu is winner of the Humboldt Research Award 2021.
Jayati Ghosh is an Indian development economist. She taught economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi for nearly 35 years, and since January 2021 she has been Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA. Her core areas of study include international economics and globalisation, employment patterns in developing countries, macroeconomic policy, and gender and development.
Bina Agarwal is an Indian development economist and Professor of Development Economics and Environment at the Global Development Institute at The University of Manchester. She has written extensively on land, livelihoods and property rights; environment and development; the political economy of gender; poverty and inequality; legal change; and agriculture and technological transformation.
Isher Judge Ahluwalia was an Indian economist, public policy researcher, and professor. She was Chairperson Emeritus, Board of Governors, at the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER). She had also served as the chairperson of the board of the International Food Policy Research Institute, and the chairperson of the Government of India's High-Powered Committee on Urban Infrastructure Services. She was awarded India's 3rd highest civilian award, Padma Bhushan, in 2009.
Bagicha Singh Minhas (1929-2005) is an Indian economist.
Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee is an Indian-born American economist who is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is co-founder and co-director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), an MIT based global research center promoting the use of scientific evidence to inform poverty alleviation strategies. In 2019, Banerjee shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Esther Duflo and Michael Kremer, "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty." He and Esther Duflo are married, and became the sixth married couple to jointly win a Nobel or Nobel Memorial Prize.
The chief economist of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is also the economic counsellor and director of the fund's Research Department and is responsible for providing independent advice to the fund on its policy issues, integrating ideas of the research in the design of policies, conveying these ideas to the policymakers inside and outside the fund and managing all research done at IMF. The chief economist is a member of the Senior Leadership of the IMF.
Barid Baran Bhattacharya was an Indian economist and educationist. He was vice-chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University. He was also Director and Professor at the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi.
Gita Gopinath is an Indian-American economist who has served as the first deputy managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), since 21 January 2022. She had previously served as chief economist of the IMF between 2019 and 2022.
Rohini Pande is an economist who is currently the Henry J. Heinz II Professor of Economics and Director of the Economic Growth Center at Yale University. She was previously the Rafik Hariri Professor of International Political Economy and Mohammed Kamal Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. Pande was the Co-Director of Center for International Development at Harvard University's Evidence for Policy Design research program (EPoD) and serves on the board of directors of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, MIT. She also serves on the board of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economic Profession (CSWEP) and as a co-editor of the American Economic Association's (AEA) journal American Economic Review: Insights. She is a Faculty Research Associate at NBER, CEPR and the IFPRI. Her research focuses on the economic analysis of the politics and consequences of different forms of redistribution, principally in developing countries. Her outstanding and empirical findings in fields of governance and accountability, women’s empowerment, role of credit in poverty, the economic aspects of the environment and the potential of policy design in these areas, won her the Infosys Prize 2022 in Social Sciences.
Arvind Subramanian is an Indian economist and the former Chief Economic Advisor to the Government of India, having served from 16 October 2014 to 20 June 2018. Subramanian is currently a Senior Fellow at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. He previously served as Professor of Economics at Ashoka University and a Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and Center for Global Development.
Padma Desai was an Indian-American development economist who was the Gladys and Roland Harriman Professor of comparative economic systems and director of the Center for Transition Economies at Columbia University. Known for her scholarship on Soviet and Indian industrial policy, she was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 2009.
Pinelopi "Penny" Koujianou Goldberg is a Greek-American economist who served as chief economist of the World Bank from 2018 until 2020. She holds the named chair of Elihu Professor of Economics at Yale University. She is also a non-resident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
Oriana Bandiera, FBA is an Italian development economist and academic, who is currently the Sir Anthony Atkinson Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics. Her research focuses on development, labour, and organisational economics. Outside of her academic appointment, she is co-editor of Econometrica, and an affiliate of the Centre for Economic Policy Research and Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development. A fellow of the Econometric Society and the British Academy, she received the Yrjö Jahnsson Award in 2019, an award granted annually to the best European economist(s) under the age of 45.
Maria Alexeevna Petrova is a Russian economist who works in Spain as a research professor at the Institute for Political Economy of the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies, as an affiliated professor with the Barcelona School of Economics, and as an associate professor at Pompeu Fabra University. Her research in applied microeconomics and media economics examines the effects of media and information flow on economics and politics.
Mar Reguant Ridó is a Spanish and American economist specializing in energy economics, and especially the environmental costs of pollution from electricity generation. She is an ICREA Researcher at the Institute for Economic Analysis of the Spanish National Research Council in Barcelona, an affiliated professor at the Barcelona School of Economics, a part-time professor at Northwestern University in Chicago, vice president of climate change at the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, D.C., and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Deborah J. Lucas is an American economist who works in the MIT Sloan School of Management as Sloan Distinguished Professor of Finance and director of the Golub Center for Finance and Policy; she is also a research affiliate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and Asian Bureau of Finance and Economic Research. Her research interests include the evaluation of governmental financial activity; she has also published work on portfolio optimization, asset pricing, and information privilege.