I am Mamidipudi Ramakrishna Sharan, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of Maryland, College Park.
My research centres around questions in development economics and political economy. I have worked as a researcher and policy economist with various research organisations and both state and central governments in India. I earned my PhD from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government in May 2020 and subsequently served as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center For Global Development.
My research examines how local governance shapes outcomes for marginalized groups in socially diverse settings, with a focus on rural India. Much of my work centers on village-level elected councils — India's primary institutions of local democratic self-governance — investigating questions of political representation, politician learning and capacity, and accountability in public service delivery. I study how the identity of leaders — their gender, caste, and ethnicity — affects these outcomes, and whether policies that reserve political offices for historically disadvantaged groups produce meaningful distributional change. A parallel strand of my work examines poverty targeting and state capacity, asking whether public programs reliably reach those they are designed to serve.
Prior to my PhD, I obtained a B.A. in Economics from Hansraj College and an M.A. from the Delhi School of Economics.
Besides my academic research, I contribute to media and other platforms. My narrative non-fiction book on village politics in Bihar, titled Last Among Equals was released in December 2021, and my novel Blue was published by HarperCollins in 2014. I also co-host the podcast “Brothers in Music: The A. R. Rahman Edition.”