Welcome! I am an associate professor of political science at the University of California, Merced. I direct a lab on the Political Economy of Agriculture and Rural Societies (PEARS) and am affiliated with IGCC and CAPE. I received my PhD in political science from Harvard University and have been a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
My research is in comparative politics, political economy of development, and economic history. Much of my work is on India, though I also work comparatively. I am especially interested in technology, bureaucracy, and democracy. I study these topics using natural experiments, spatial data, machine learning, and a lot of time spent doing fieldwork and in libraries.
Contact Info
Office: COB2 (building), 310 (office)
Mail: University of California, Merced
School of Social Science, Humanities, and Arts
5200 North Lake Road, Merced, CA 95343, USA
Email: adasgupta3 [at] ucmerced.edu
Phone: +1 (240) 893 0993
What's new/recent (updated April 2024):
Some work on bureaucrat assignments in India conditionally accepted at AJPS
An article on the economic/technological origins of the rural-urban divide (APSR 2024)
A recently published 'think piece' chapter on the role of natural experiments in HPE
Some work-in-progress on inference with image data using computer vision (R and R at APSR)
An article on some of the PEARS lab's work using computer vision