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I am an Assistant Professor of Economics (Ph.D. faculty of International Trade) at Clark University. I hold a Ph.D. degree in Economics from Purdue University, and a BA/MA degree in Mathematics and a BA in Economics from SUNY Potsdam. At Clark, I teach international economics both at the Ph.D. and at undergraduate levels, and continue to produce scholarly research in the fields of international trade, transportation, labor economics and applied microeconomics using econometric analysis, computable general equilibrium (CGE) models, and geographic information systems (GIS) analyses.

Additionally, I have held research positions at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, Asian Development Bank (ADB), Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) and Overstock.com Inc., where I worked on a wide range of policy and industry-relevant research projects utilizing a combination of applied research techniques. I recently published co-authored research projects with the World Bank and the ADB investigating the trade effects of Belt and Road initiative of China (at Journal of Development Economics) and the CAREC transport infrastructure reforms (forthcoming) respectively, using an integration of econometric, CGE and GIS analyses. Currently, I am serving as an editorial board member of Nepal government’s research journal (NPPR), and working on the research project: Effects of Discount Coupons and Promotions on Gross Merchandise Sales, using machine-learning techniques, in the Core Machine Learning Department (Experimentation Science Group) at Overstock.com.

My current line of research investigates the trade and welfare effects of trading times in the presence of global input-output linkages. Constructing a measure for indirect time costs that are incurred while accessing the intermediate inputs, I show that any country that has a higher ability to transport goods on time has a comparative advantage in industries that highly value timely delivery of their inputs, and this comparative advantage pattern is stronger for processed goods as opposed to primary goods. My Ph.D. dissertation is a part of the IMF’s Trade Integration in Latin America project, 2017. Using the GTAP firm-heterogeneity CGE model combined with the global input-output database in GTAP, I also examine the general equilibrium effects of transportation infrastructure reforms on the export participation and composition, and the resulting welfare in South Asia and Central Asia.

My ongoing co-authored research projects with graduate students at Clark University and Harvard University compute the optimal transport paths and times between cities in the presence of worldwide multimodal transport networks, border delays and geographical features, incorporating potential modal substitutions. Using this, we examine how the effects of transportation infrastructure differ across products in terms of their location decisions due to the variation in time sensitivity of products at different production stages. By geographically locating firms across countries along the worldwide transport networks, we examine if products integrated into global value chains choose to locate closer to the source of their inputs in order to avoid indirect time costs. That is, we explore the effects of transport reforms on firm migration and productivity, and therefore, on the diversification and dispersion of economic activities across space.