I am currently a Posdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Warwick. I completed my PhD in Economics from the University of Minnesota in 2026.
My research combines causal inference techniques with structural macroeconomic models to answer fundamental questions about economic growth and inequality.
Email: vermabipul01@gmail.com
Address: S2.89, Department of Economics, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK CV4 7AL
Degrees of Development: General-Equilibrium Effects of Large-Scale Tertiary Education Expansion
[Presented: EGSC 2025 (Washington University in St Louis), Labor Workshop (Duke University), EWMED 2025 (University of Cyprus), Midwest Macro 2026 (Marquette University), SED 2026 (AUEB, Greece)]
I study the effect of higher education on economic development, using India’s liberalization of private colleges together with a rule that tied each new college to a pre-assigned state university. Because the distance to the assigned university is fixed by historical jurisdiction, it provides exogenous variation in college expansion across districts. A one-percentage-point increase in the graduate share over a decade lowers the agricultural employment share by 0.37 percentage points, raises the services share by 0.50 percentage points, raises GDP per worker by 2.3 percent and household consumption per capita by 1.6 percent, and compresses the college wage premium. I embed these estimates in a spatial general-equilibrium model with trade between districts and endogenous college choice, in which district productivities and skill intensities are recovered from the data. Relative to the partial-equilibrium IV estimates, the reform’s contribution to the reallocation of employment falls by about half in general equilibrium: its share of the decline in agricultural employment falls from 29 to 15 percent, and its share of the rise in services from 41 to 16 percent, while its effects on the wage premium and consumption change negligibly. Removing the remaining distance penalty on college entry would raise the graduate share by a further 4.9 percentage points and real consumption per worker by 4.5 percent.
College Education and Inequality Across Space with Sang Min Lee
[Presented: SED Winter 2024, Urban Econ Association, USC, U Monash, LAEF-NYU]
Wage inequality across US states has risen since 1980 alongside uneven growth in their college-educated workforces. We show that this uneven growth reflects residents' college attainment rather than migration of the high-skilled. We develop a quantitative spatial model with endogenous college attendance and migration for education and work to quantify the effects of federal and state higher education policies. Had these policies remained at their 1980 levels, the 1980-2019 rise in the standard deviation of log mean wages across states would have been 75 percent larger. Federal policies drive this inequality-reducing effect because they are financed by nationwide taxes, and enrollment in poorer states responds more strongly to tuition reductions. Separately, we evaluate state higher education spending accounting for spatial spillovers: on average, each dollar generates $2.91 in local wage gains a decade later, but net returns are negative where brain drain is severe.
Revisiting Global Income Convergence in 21st Century
Recent research has documented a reversal from divergence to convergence in income levels between rich and poor countries after 2000. This paper employs a growth accounting framework that incorporates heterogeneity in capital income shares–unlike the constant one-third share typically assumed–to investigate global income dynamics over the time period 1980-2019. I find that while output levels began to converge only after 2000, capital (physical and human) had already been converging during 1980-2000. The divergence in total factor productivity (TFP) during this earlier period offset the gains from capital convergence, resulting in little overall income convergence. After 2000, capital maintained its pattern of convergence, and, unlike in the earlier period, TFP also began to converge. Quantitatively, more than half of the convergence between 2000 and 2019—and nearly all the convergence between 1980 and 2019 outside Sub-Saharan Africa—can be attributed to the convergence in capital rather than to improvements in TFP. These findings highlight that factor accumulation has played a much larger role in driving long-run convergence dynamics than previously documented in the literature.
Demography and Structural Transformation with Ruyan Liao
Labor Market Dynamics in Developing Economies with Ravinder
Multi-region Carbon Tax under Time Inconsistency with Honey Batra, Monishankar Bishnu, and Tridip Ray
