Bipul Verma

I am currently a PhD student at University of Minnesota and on the 2025/26 job market.
My research interest lies in the domain of Macroeconomics, Growth and Development, Spatial Economics. Education and Environment Economics.

Email: verma176@umn.edu
Address: 1925 South 4th Street, 4-101 Hanson Hall, Minneapolis, MN 55455

Working Papers

Higher Education and Economic Development: Evidence from College Expansion in India (Job Marker Paper)

This paper revisits the role of human-capital growth in driving structural transformation and output expansion by exploiting the post-2000 liberalization of India’s higher-education sector. Leveraging spatial heterogeneity in college expansion—generated by nationwide deregulation and institutional constraints on college locations—I estimate the causal effect of an exogenous increase in the local supply of college-educated workers on regional economic outcomes. The rise in the share of college graduates between 2001 and 2011 explains 78 % of the decline in the aggregate agricultural employment share and the entire increase in the aggregate service-sector employment share over the same period. It also accounts for 20 % of overall GDP growth and 25 % of the increase in GDP per capita. Moreover, the expanded skilled-labor supply is associated with higher employment shares in large, skill-intensive industries within both manufacturing and services. These findings suggest that improving access to higher education can powerfully propel structural transformation, economic modernization, and growth.

Higher Education Policies and Spatial Inequality Across US States with Sang Min Lee
[Presented: SED Winter 2024, Scheduled: Urban Econ Association, USC, U Monash, LAEF-NYU]

To what extent have the federal and state higher education policies—which have affected the supply and demand of college education—contributed to the growing cross-state wage inequality since 1980? To address this question, we develop and estimate a quantitative spatial model with endogenous college education and migration. The model features skill-biased technical changes and agglomeration effects, which means that a state’s average wage rises as more residents attain college degrees or as college-educated workers migrate into the state. Counterfactual analyses reveal that tuition discounts and public appropriations by the federal and state governments have become more progressive. In the baseline, the standard deviation of log mean wages across states increased from 0.087 in 1980 to 0.117 in 2019. In contrast, had the higher education policies remained at their 1980 levels, the standard deviation would have risen by 73% more to 0.139 by 2019. Agglomeration effects played a significant role in this result: if they had been half as strong as estimated, the standard deviation would have increased by 17% more (instead of 73%) in the counterfactual than in the baseline.

Revisiting Global Income Convergence in 21st Century

Recent research has documented a reversal from divergence to convergence in income levels between rich- and poor countries. However, the underlying drivers of this turnaround and subsequent convergence remains under-explored. This paper employs a growth accounting framework to investigate the proximate sources of convergence over the period 1980-2019. The results indicate that more than half of the convergence between 2000 and 2019-and nearly all the convergence between 1980 and 2019 outside Sub-Saharan Africa-arises from the convergence in physical and human capital, rather than from improvements in total factor productivity (TFP). These findings contradict the prevailing hypothesis that TFP dynamics primarily explain cross-country income disparities and highlights the importance of factor accumulation in shaping long-run growth and convergence dynamics.

Work in Progress

Demography and Structural Transformation with Ruyan Liao

Labor Market Dynamics in Developing Economies with Ravinder

Multi-region Carbon Tax under Time Inconsistency with Honey Batra, Monishankar Bishnu, and Tridip Ray