Kaivan Munshi examines role of informal community institutions in development

With much of his work based in India, Kaivan Munshi, considered a global leader in the field of economic development, has examined the role played by informal community institutions in the process of development.

A faculty member in the Department of Economics and a faculty affiliate of the Economic Growth Center at Yale University, Munshi was named Frederick W. Beinecke Professor of Economics in June, according to a university release.

An alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology, Munshi’s research over the past 30 years has examined the role played by informal community institutions in the process of development.

Much of this work is based in India, where the caste is a natural social unit around which networks serving different economic functions (such as providing jobs and credit for their members) can be organized.

Since joining the Yale faculty in 2019, Munshi has continued to advance his long-term research program on social networks, exploring the historical origins of private enterprise in India and in China. In addition, he has extended his research in two directions: First, he has moved beyond the analysis of intra-group interactions to look at interactions between ethnic groups.

His recent research in this area studies the status game between upper castes and lower castes in rural India, showing that status considerations help explain the withdrawal of women from the labor force that has been observed to accompany economic growth in that country.

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A second line of research, at the intersection of economics and evolutionary biology, studies how adaptation to conditions of scarcity in the pre-modern economy can explain two recently documented facts: the weak association between nutritional status and income in developing countries, and the unusually high risk of diabetes among normal weight individuals in those countries.

The first stage of Munsh’s research was devoted to providing credible empirical evidence that social norms and community-based networks have large effects on individual decisions and outcomes in developing economies. The second stage studied how networks can support or restrict the mobility of their members, depending on the context, with important consequences for development.

Munshi’s research has been supported by numerous NSF and NIH grants and has been published in the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Review of Economic Studies.

He received the Infosys Prize in the Social Sciences in 2016 in recognition of his analysis of the multifaceted role of communities — such as ethnic groups and castes — in the process of economic development.

He earned his PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MS and MCP degrees at the University of California, Berkeley, and a B Tech degree from the Indian Institute of Technology.