I joined the Economics department at Colorado State University, 2007 after doing a PhD at the New School for Social Research, with Prof. Duncan Foley. Before my Phd, I had taught economics for many years at PGDAV College at Delhi University. I did my Masters in Economics at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and my MPhil at the Center for Development Studies, Trivandrum ).
While my earlier research, in India studied the transformation of labor markets in the colonial agrarian economy (a case study of two districts in Eastern U.P.), my more recent focus has been on international finance. More broadly, I am interested in Marxian and Classical Political Economy, Open Economy Macroeconomics and the Political Economy of Money and Finance. An account of my intellectual journey can be found in a book chapter Labor, Imperialism and Finance: My journey as an economist
My research explores the historical workings of the international monetary system and the role of the periphery in the institutional mechanisms of adjustment and liquidity generation of the pre-war sterling-gold standard and the post war dollar standard. This research has led to a project that seeks to extend Marx’s monetary theory in order to develop a framework for analyzing the actual evolution of the monetary system based on the monetary liability of a dominant country, drawing more broadly on Keynes, Minsky, the Post-Keynesian and Money view literature. The broader goal is to understand the complex relation between the state and financial markets that mediates imperial power, the implications of trade and financial flows for uneven development and the different ways in which integration with global markets shapes the developmental trajectory of countries in the developing world.
My husband Ashok Prasad – an economist turned physicist who works on problems in biology- is also at Colorado State University