Rohini Somanathan, a Senior Research Fellow at EfD India and Professor at the Delhi School of Economics, has been elected as one of the 2021 fellows of The Econometric Society.
The Econometric Society is one of the oldest and most prestigious associations of academic economists, founded for the advancement of economic theory in its relation to statistics and mathematics. The society was founded over 90 years ago with its founding members amongst the likes of Joseph Schumpeter, Ragnar Frisch, Harold Hotelling, and Karl Menger among others.
Rohini Somanathan is the first woman based in India to be elected as a fellow. She shares this accolade with eminent Indian economists like Amartya Sen (the first Indian economist to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, 1998), Sukhamoy Chakravarty, CR Rao, and Kaushik Basu.
Rohini Somanathan’s research broadly spans the fields of Public Economics, Development, and Political Economy. She is interested in studying how social institutions interact with public policies to shape patterns of economic and social inequality.
She is particularly interested in exploring the intellectual and ideological environment within which state policy is created and justified. In the field of development economics, she has worked on group identity and provision of public goods, gender equality, child nutrition, and environmental quality.