Dr. Rajiv Sethi is a professor of economics at Barnard College, Columbia University, and an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, Santa Fe. He has previously held visiting positions at Microsoft Research in New York City and at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He is currently on the editorial boards of the American Economic Review and Economics and Philosophy. He has a BSc in mathematics from the University of Southampton and a PhD in economics from the New School for Social Research. His research is primarily in microeconomic theory, with its applications to inequality, identity, economic development, and criminal justice. He is a co-author, with Brendan O’Flaherty, of Shadows of Doubt: Stereotypes, Crime, and the Pursuit of Justice, published by Harvard University Press in 2019.

The promise of universal access to basic goods such as secondary education appears in the laws of most nations, yet actual access is slow and uneven, with some communities benefiting disproportionately. Dr. Sethi’s Fulbright-Nehru research concerns the manner in which access to high schools for different social groups is influenced by their geography and how the demographic composition of villages affects the likelihood of having a high school. The work is quantitative in nature, making use of statistical and econometric methods, and data involving more than a half million villages, which account for over 90 per cent of the rural population of India.