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Yale University has appointed Kaivan Munshi, a global leader in the field of economic development, as the Frederick W. Beinecke Professor of Economics. He is a member of Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) in the Department of Economics and is a faculty affiliate of the Economic Growth Center.
Since joining the Yale faculty in 2019, Munshi has continued to advance his long-term research program on social networks, exploring the historical origins of private enterprise in India and China. His recent research in this area studies the status game between upper castes and lower castes in rural India and the impact of adaptation to conditions of scarcity in the pre-modern economy.
Munshi’s research over last three decades has examined the role played by informal community institutions in the process of development. His research involves the impact social norms and community-based networks have on individual decisions and outcomes in developing economies and how these networks can support or restrict the mobility of their members, depending on the context, with important consequences for development. Much of this work is based in India, where caste is a natural social unit around which networks serving different economic functions can be organized.
Munshi’s research has been supported by numerous NSF and NIH grants and has been published in the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, and Review of Economic Studies. In 2016, he received the Infosys Prize in the Social Sciences.
He earned his Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, M.S. and M.C.P. degrees at the University of California, Berkeley, and a B. Tech. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology.
