Keynote Speakers

Kaivan Munshi is currently Professor of Economics at Yale University, a Faculty Affiliate of the Economic Growth Center, and was previously the Frank Ramsey Professor of Economics at the University of Cambridge. Professor Munshi’s research has been published in the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Review of Economic Studies. 

Professor Munshi’s long-term research program examines the multifaceted role played by informal community institutions in the process of development. The first stage in this research was devoted to providing credible empirical evidence that social norms and community-based networks have large effects on individual decisions and outcomes in developing economies. The second stage studied how networks can support or restrict the mobility of their members, depending on the context, with important consequences for development. Much of this work is based in India, where the caste is a natural social unit around which networks serving different economic functions (such as providing jobs and credit for their members) can be organized.

Gabriele Gratton is Professor of Politics and Economics at the UNSW Business School and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. He is the director of the UNSW Resilient Democracy Lab and a research fellow of the PERICLES research unit at Bocconi University.  

Professor Gratton’s research focuses on the determinants of democratic stability and the design of robust democratic institutions in the context of increasing media pluralism. His work has been published in leading international journals in Economics, including American Economic Review, Review of Economic Studies, International Economic Review, Theoretical Economics, and Games and Economic Behavior, and has provided novel insights into what economic, technological, and political factors increase the viability of liberal democratic institutions in the long run.  As a researcher, he uses the tools of game theory and applied economics to build models of political and economic institutions to understand how they work and how they affect political demands for change.