Tamoghna Halder
Areas of Interest & Expertise
- Economic History
- Labour Economics
- Economic History of Identities
- Economics of Discrimination
Biography
Following my MStat (Masters in Statistics) from Indian Statistical Institute, I went on to pursue my PhD in Economics from the University of California, Davis. As an applied economist, I seek to investigate how historical institutions, whether formal or informal, have persistent, long-run effect on inequality, human capital accumulation, growth, development, and diversity. For example, in one of the chapters of my doctoral research I use archived graduation records of students from elite universities to trace group-level social mobility in India for different caste and religious groups over the last 150 years. In fact, I find it fascinating to extract and analyse economic information from historical texts – whether these are pieces of ancient literature or boring records maintained by bureaucrats/institutions. Therefore, fellow economists often classify me as an Economic Historian, however, my research spans several other fields such as Labour, Development and Political Economy as well.
I love to teach as much and have taught several courses in Economics to both undergraduate and graduate students including a unique course, “How to Teach Economics” to PhD students at University of California, Davis. At Azim Premji University, I am currently teaching two courses: Intermediate Microeconomics (UG) and Economics of Identity (PG).
I am also a regular contributor of op-ed articles at Al Jazeera. At different turns of life, I wanted to be a poet, a theatre practitioner, or a filmmaker, but failed so bad, that I decided to become an Economist instead. Nevertheless, poetry, films and theatre continue to be my breathing space till date.
Courses
Economics of Identity
How does a sense of self determine and affect economic outcomes?
Intermediate Microeconomic Theory
Do individuals calculate their actions to suit consequences? Are individual’s choices purely self-interested? How do individual behaviours affect social institutions? And how can policies take heed to these behaviours?
Publications:
Journal Articles:
T. Halder, K. Sharma, S. Ghosh and R. Verbrugge. (2015). How do adults reason about their opponent? Typologies of players in a turn-taking game. In D. Noelle et al (Ed), Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2015), 854 — 859. (PDF)
S. Ghosh, T. Halder, K. Sharma and R. Verbrugge. (2015). Human strategic reasoning in dynamic games: Experiments, logics, cognitive models. In W. van der Hoek et al (eds), Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Logic, Rationality and Interaction (LORI 2015), 116 — 128. (PDF)
Newspaper Articles:
In recent past, I have contributed articles for Al Jazeera. For the list of articles, follow my author profile.
Work in progress:
Caste, Reservation and Social Mobility in India: 1856 – 2017 (aka Job Market Paper)
Gender-gap among Elite Graduates: A Social Mobility Perspective
Residential Segregation in Bengal: It is what it was (1870 – 2020)