Palaash Bhargava

Hello!

I am currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago. I am also associated with the Behavioral Insights and Parenting Lab at the Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago as a visiting scholar.

I am an applied micro-economist whose work lies at the intersection of human capital formation, identity, public health and social networks. 

Geographically, my work focuses on three key regions: India, US and Saudi Arabia. Within India, I run large scale field experiments to understand topics at the intersection of social networks and human capital formation. Within the US, I work with large scale credit datasets to understand financial dependencies within family networks when it comes to college financing or sharing risks emanating from natural disasters. Within the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, I actively work in collaboration with researchers at University of Chicago and the Ministry of Economy and Planning to push for scientific evidence based policy reforms. To do so, I again rely on field experiments currently running both in the education and public health domain. Finally, my work in identity and intergenerational networks has allowed me to build historical meta-datasets by exploiting internet archives and information portals such as Wikipedia and Wikidata.

I, along with Tarang Tripathi, also run the research wing of Aawaaz Education Services in India. If you are planning on running experiments in India (especially in the education space) and are looking for implementation partners, please feel free to reach out.

Here is a link to my CV (last updated October 2025)

You can find me on twitter here: @palaashbhargava. 

My email address is: pbhargava@uchicago.edu