I am Mamidipudi Ramakrishna Sharan, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of Maryland, College Park. I am also Affiliate Faculty at the Department of Economics.
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.”