Nishith Prakash is an associate professor of economics on a joint position with the Department of Economics and the Human Rights Institute at the University of Connecticut, Storrs.
Born and raised in Bihar, India, he earned B.A. (honors) in economics from Shivaji College, an M.A. in economics from Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University (India), and a Ph.D. in economics from University of Houston, TX and was a post-doctoral research associate at Cornell University, NY from July 2010 till December 2011. He previously held visiting Assistant Professor Positions at Ohio University, and Dartmouth College and Visiting Fellow at Yale University, Columbia University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professor Prakash is a fellow with the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School (2019-2021).
He is a Research Fellow at Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration (CReAM), The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA), HiCN Households in Conflict Network (HiCN), Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) Network Researcher, Global Labor Organization (GLO), and Member of Insights on Immigration and Development (INSIDE-SPAIN). He is currently serving in the Editorial Board of the journal Economies.
Prof. Prakash’s primary research interests include development, political economy, public policy, and economics of education. Through his academic pursuit, Prof. Prakash has focused on the relationship between government policies and economic development and harnessed rigorous empirical evidence to study the impact of policies and institutions in enabling inclusive growth. He has experience in conducting surveys in developing countries, working with large-scale observational and administrative data sets, and in conducting field experiments (RCTs). Prof. Prakash has worked closely with Department of Education (in Bihar, Nepal, Zanzibar, and Zambia), and the State Police (in Bihar, and Telangana), and on several projects with the World Bank. His teaching interests include Development Economics, Applied Econometrics and Economics of Gender and Inequality.
Professor Prakash’s research has been covered in The Economist, World Bank Development Impact Blog, World Economic Forum, Financial Times, Forbes, The Statesman, The Atlantic, The Indian Express, The Hindu, The Times of India, and other national and international newspapers.