Teaching & Research

Since 2018, I am working as an Assistant Lecturer in the department of economics at the University of Essex. In 2019, I also achieved the Associate Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy (commended application).

I have taught the following modules,

  • Introduction to Economics for Business

  • Introduction to Behavioral Economics

  • Introduction to Quantitative Economics

  • Mathematical Methods in Economics

  • Methods of Economic Analysis

Research Papers

  • An Experimental Study on the Role of Social Norms For Tax Compliance (JMP)

  • Incentives for whistle-blowing: An Experiment

Abstract: We conducted a lab experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of financial rewards in increasing whistle-blowing of corrupt activities. Our experiment consists of a variant of the dictator game, a bribery game and a post experiment questionnaire. Corruption, in our experiment, arises when a participant in the role of a public official asks a citizen to pay a bribe. The citizen can refuse the bribe, pay the bribe, or pay the bribe and report it. Reporting is costly and citizen is rewarded if the official’s guilt gets established. It is also possible for the citizen to report the official even if there was no bribe asked. Hence, our design allows for false reporting. The results from our experiment have shown that the impact of financial rewards on bribe incidence and whistle-blowing are influenced by the underlying judicial environment. Percentage of officials who ask for a bribe as well as the average bribe asked is higher under low judicial accuracy than under high judicial accuracy. We find that there is a significant decrease in false reporting by citizens under a higher evidence threshold. Whistle-blowing is optimal when high evidence threshold is accompanied by an improvement in judicial accuracy.

  • Diverse Committees (with Friederike Mengel and Niall Hughes)

Abstract: We investigate the potential of diversity to influence committee decision-making. We present a model in which committee members receive private information on a state of the world, deliberate and vote. Committee members belong to one of two groups which may differ along two dimensions: (a) their preferences and (b) their information structures. Diverse committees are optimal when information structures are correlated within groups, while homogeneous committees make fewer mistakes when there is no informational correlation within groups, but there is heterogeneity of preferences across groups. We test the model’s key predictions in a laboratory experiment. The model’s predictions are largely borne out - diverse committees outperform homogeneous committees when information structures are correlated. This occurs despite subjects revealing more information than theory predicts and updating imperfectly.

I have also worked as a referee for the following journals,

  • Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization (JEBO)

  • European Economic Review (EER)