About
I am an economist working on AI, development, and environmental economics. I am Director of Research and Chief Economist at the International Growth Centre at the London School of Economics (LSE). I am also a Research Fellow in the Department of Economics, LSE. I hold a PhD in Economics from LSE.
My research asks how energy systems, climate change, and new technologies like AI shape structural transformation, and how institutions can manage those transitions. I work with field experiments, administrative data, and quantitative models, mostly on projects in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Much of the data comes from partnerships with the utilities, revenue authorities, and ministries that run the systems I study.
The questions that motivate the work are analytically difficult and immediately consequential: how to design a power market that firms and households can rely on; how economies build new productive capabilities in an era of AI; and how people with the fewest resources can adapt to a changing climate.
Alongside the research, I lead the IGC’s global research portfolio and a team of more than twenty economists, and advise governments across Africa, MENA, and Asia on policies for sustainable economic growth, including senior decision-makers in Pakistan, Ethiopia, Ghana, Jordan, India, and Myanmar.
Research leadership
At the IGC I help set research priorities and connect academic work to the questions facing policymakers in low- and middle-income countries. The portfolio spans sustainable growth, firms, cities, and state effectiveness across eleven country programmes in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.
My own policy engagement has concentrated on electricity pricing and market design and fiscal reform, with a growing focus on the role of AI and new technologies in economic transformation. This complements the academic research rather than substituting for it: each supplies the questions, the data, and the institutional constraints of the other.
Full record
Appointments, education, research, and recent policy engagements.