Contributor : Profile
Paul Novosad is Associate Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College and cofounder of Development Data Lab. Development Data Lab works with governments, firms, and civil society organizations to generate policy-relevant knowledge and open data from information age sources like satellites, and private and government sector data exhaust. Some of his recent projects have focused on judicial bias in India, the impacts of India's large-scale rural roads program, the impacts of mineral sector development, and on measuring intergenerational mobility in developing countries.
Posts by Paul Novosad
Do judges favour defendants like themselves? Evidence from Indian courts
Around the world, research has shown that people in positions of power tend to favour those who share their social identity. To examine whether the same is true in Indian courts, this article analyses...
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Elliot Ash
Samuel Asher
Aditi Bhowmick
Sandeep Bhupatiraju
Christoph Goessmann
Daniel Li Chen
Paul Novosad
29 September, 2025
- Articles
The long-run effects of agricultural productivity gains: Evidence from irrigation canals in India
Evidence from canals in India shows that labour mobility is a key channel to agricultural growth. This article shows that villages with access to canal water have persistently higher agricultural yiel...
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Samuel Asher
Alison Campion
Douglas Gollin
Paul Novosad
21 October, 2022
- Articles
Digging for dirt: Rent-seeking among elected politicians in India’s mineral belt
The Indian mining industry is no stranger to corruption scandals and every year dozens of environmental activists are murdered for exposing illegal mining activities. This article discusses the impact...
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Samuel Asher
Paul Novosad
10 November, 2020
- Articles
The SHRUG: A new high-resolution data platform for research on India
The Socioeconomic High-resolution Rural-Urban Geographic Dataset on India (SHRUG) is a new data source that describes socioeconomic development in India. In this post, Asher, Lunt, and Novosad describ...
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Samuel Asher
Tobias Lunt
Paul Novosad
13 March, 2020
- Perspectives
Rapid urbanisation, rural-to-urban migration, and rural development: Evidence from 8,000 Indian towns
Rapid urbanisation and declining rural poverty are central features of many developing countries today, but there is little research on their relationship, especially on the impacts of rapid urbanisat...
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Paul Novosad
31 March, 2018
- IGC Research on India
How do rural roads affect development? Evidence from India
Despite broad consensus that high transportation costs are a large barrier to economic development, many of the world’s poor live in rural communities without paved roads, impeding their access to o...
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Paul Novosad
30 June, 2016
- IGC Research on India
Do ruling coalition-affiliated MLAs bring more development to their constituencies?
Despite the dismantling of the License Raj in the 1990s, interaction with government officials remains an important impediment to doing business in India. This column analyses the role of politics in...
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Samuel Asher
Paul Novosad
22 June, 2015
- Articles
Rapid Response Project on Indian Firm Data
In March 2015, IGC organised a Workshop on Industry Data, held in Delhi. The workshop provided an opportunity for academics, policy makers and government agencies to discuss difficulties they face wit...
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Samuel Asher
Paul Novosad
31 March, 2015
- IGC Research on India