KDI School | World Bank | I4Replication
I am a job market candidate with a PhD in Public Policy from the KDI School of Public Policy and Management. I work as a Development Policy Expert (STC) at ImpactAI, the World Bank and Research Fellow at Institute for Replication (I4R). My research interests include the political economy of conflict, development, and state capacity building.
In my jmp, I show that property-rights reforms can reshape institutions far beyond their administrative mandate. I exploit the staggered introduction of land-record digitization to trace its spillovers across rural institutions in Punjab, Pakistan. Drawing on 45,347 confidential anti-corruption incidents, administrative records on agricultural credit, court cases, and taxation, I show that digitization expands agricultural credit, raises corruption detection, improves land-case resolution, and activates rental markets. These gains do not stem from shifts in the landownership patterns. Rather, digitization renders land records public and transparent, breaking local officials’ exclusive control over them and reshaping how rural institutions function.
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My dissertation "Political Economy of Conflict and Development" focuses on the causes and consequences of terrorism. I evaluate the impact of the death of Osama bin Laden on terrorism, education, labor market and voting in Pakistan. One of the chapter is published in Labour Economics and can be found in research tab.
In my role with ImpactAI, I work with a domain-specific metadata schema that automatically extracts, normalizes, and structures evidence from RCTs in development economics. The system then makes this critical research seamlessly queryable through an intuitive conversational interface.
