Rajdev Brar

Currently PhD Ag & Resource Economics UC Berkeley | Previously: World Bank, J-PAL, McGill | 🇮🇳🇵🇭

[Dean Karlan @deankarlan]

New working paper with @AmolRaswan and Chris Udry: "The Sisyphean Pursuit of Evidence for Poverty Traps."

A central idea in development economics is that poverty can trap people. We went looking for the cleanest evidence. Here's what we found – and didn't.

[Matt Lowe @hmmlowe]

We (me, @Jeff_Weaver_, @anahitark) are looking to hire an RA to help with work on social norms in Gujarat. Full details in the link, and feel free to help us by RTing!

https://t.co/xE0Ql1aVyK

[Vijayshree @Vijayshreeeee]

If you work with district-level data in India, you expect every cross-section to have new district names. Since Stata's encode resets alphabetically for every file, your numeric codes shift, making merges & appends tricky! As a workaround, I made a package "naam" and it's on SSC!

[Rajdev Brar @Rajdev_Brar]

https://t.co/wMdmFOj5Xi Fantastic resource by Land Rights Initiative (LRI) -- a database of 1000+ colonial & post-colonial central and state laws in India

[Shivakumar Jolad (ಶಿವಕುಮಾರ್ ಜೋಳದ್) @shivakjolad]

We are pleased to share the release of a major open data resource on Harvard Dataverse:
Indian Census Data Collection, 1901–2026: Digitised Subnational Population and Administrative Datasets
DOI: https://t.co/zsSOTCGyuD
#OpenData #India #Census #SocialScience
What’s included?
• Population time series (1901–2011)- Census A02 (cleaned and strcutured)
• first time digitization of Primary Census Abstract tables (state & district level)-1961, 1971, and 1981
• 2026 subdistrict-level administrative directory linked to census data (2011)
#DataInfrastructure #ResearchData

[Jessica Leight @leightjessica]

Rare sighting in the latest JDE #econtwitter #econsky: a paper about Somalia!
Brar et al. show that an intervention targeting gender norms shifts support for gender-equitable norms + aspirations; novel lab-in-the-field evidence of enhanced ability to withstand peer pressure

[Berkeley Agricultural and Resource Economics @AreBerkeley]

Call for papers: UC Berkeley conference honoring Elisabeth Sadoulet — October 17, 2026. Abstract submission deadline: March 15. Conference papers will be invited to submit to a special issue of the Journal of Development Economics in her honor.
https://t.co/97lnMcsbBP

[QJE @QJEHarvard]

The February 2026 issue of the #QJE is now online here: https://t.co/EJ0AwDsh0E