Ashutosh Dinesh Thakur is an Assistant Professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at NUS. Ashutosh holds his Ph.D. in Business Administration (Political Economics) from Stanford University's Graduate School of Business '21 and A.B. with Highest Honors in Economics and certificates in Applied and Computational Mathematics, Political Economy, and Finance from Princeton University '14. Prior to joining NUS, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cologne's Cluster of Excellence ECONTribute: Markets and Public Policy. He is also a Faculty Associate of the Center on Asia and Globalization.
His research applies tools of market design to political economy, with a focus on institutional stability and organizational productivity. For example, he studies mechanisms allocating elite civil servants to states in India and party-specific mechanisms for assigning politicians to committees in the US Senate. He develops tools and techniques in matching theory that can be used in these instances to better understand the problem (empirically and theoretically) and to design better mechanisms (an engineering perspective). He also studies the stability of institutions and what leads to endogenous changes in institutions. Why do the two parties in the US Senate settle on different matching mechanisms? Why have the Indian Civil Service cadre allocation procedures changed? Who benefits and who loses? Which coalitions try to overturn the system?
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