Rahul Mehrotra
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Rahul Mehrotra
@rahul-mehrotra.com
Development Economist.

Origins in Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb.
Reposted by Rahul Mehrotra
A remarkable story: Omar Yaghi, born a refugee in Jordan, came to America as a teen to attend community college and later earned a Ph.D. and the 2025 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Immigrants have won 40% of the U.S. Nobel Prizes in science since 2000. @mclem.org
www.forbes.com/sites/stuart...
Half Of The 2025 U.S. Nobel Prize Winners In Science Are Immigrants
Three of the six U.S. winners in the 2025 Nobel Prize science categories immigrated to the United States, one of them as a teenager.
www.forbes.com
October 10, 2025 at 5:02 AM
Reposted by Rahul Mehrotra
[13MSP #ConventionOnClusterMunitions] Lao PDR, Iraq & others stated clearance, risk education or victim assistance had to be reduced or stopped.
@hi-federation.bsky.social & @banclusterbombs.bsky.social call on states to ensure funding for all affected States to achieve clearance of cluster munition
September 18, 2025 at 10:18 AM
The 13th meeting of the Convention on Cluster Munitions starts today in Geneva: www.clusterconvention.org/13msp-int/

The Legacies of War project does a great job at explaining why these meetings matter: www.legaciesofwar.org

But, what do we know about the economics of humanitarian demining?
HOME | Legacies of War
Legacies of War (LoW) is an educational and advocacy organization building more awareness about the American Secret War in Laos and Vietnam War era conflicts in neighboring Cambodia and Vietnam. We ad...
www.legaciesofwar.org
September 16, 2025 at 10:53 AM
Reposted by Rahul Mehrotra
Very useful discussion on the perils of using micro/cross-sectional parameter estimates in inferring the aggregate effects of policies/shocks. This is pervasive in Economics, yet the two effects can even have the opposite signs. (Example in next post.) voxdev.org/topic/method...
The ‘missing intercept’ problem with going from micro to macro
Many applied microeconomics papers conclude with a back-of-the-envelope calculation that scales their cross-sectional estimates to the aggregate level. These types of aggregate estimates are only vali...
voxdev.org
September 12, 2025 at 8:17 PM
Reposted by Rahul Mehrotra
Man United, doing their bit to raise the spirits of a nation. Well done Grimsby!
August 27, 2025 at 9:19 PM
Nice summary of an important macro-dev paper on India's 'regulatory cholesterol' - another must-read for policymakers by Shoumitro Chatterjee et al.
Shoumitro Chatterjee, Kala Krishna, Kalyani Padmakumar, & Yingyan Zhao argue that easing exit barriers for #manufacturing firms in India could lead to significant gains in terms of aggregate #productivity, #output, and employment.
cepr.org/voxeu/column...
#EconSky
August 21, 2025 at 1:05 PM
Very nice illustration of relational inequality.

Admittedly painful to read after recently declining an invitation to attend an old school friend's 3-day long birthday celebrations on an Indonesian island 💸
Weddings, dinners, weekends away: maintaining social connections is becoming increasingly expensive. on.ft.com/4mf9q8I
August 18, 2025 at 6:33 PM
In a chaotic, ever-changing world, a stoic hero continues to stand undaunted in the same position (15th with negative goal difference) as last season. 🫣
August 17, 2025 at 6:57 PM
Attributing low innovation to brain-drain/migration is like blaming your TV remote for world events.
August 13, 2025 at 9:42 AM
Alternate headline: Indian IT giants getting better at helping clients actually generate value using gen-AI

100 trillion $ question: who will eat more of the pie over the long term - the parent firms who build AI (like automobiles) or those who build with AI as an input (like electricity)?
August 10, 2025 at 12:52 PM
Sobering episode for anyone trying to join the dots to identify macro-risks slowly yet steadily building up over the horizon.

Ideal to suppress the pain of a challenging summer hike/ride.
August 5, 2025 at 5:31 PM
Light-hearted, instinctive response to yet another thought piece (second of this summer) pondering the state of an entire field of inquiry without acknowledging the power dynamics that shape it 😉

www.youtube.com/watch?v=KWa-...
"I am what you made me" - Darth Vader
YouTube video by TurtleMan Productions
www.youtube.com
August 4, 2025 at 2:20 PM
"Natural experiments, high stakes, ..., observability of strategies, incentives, actions and consequences, large datasets, exogenous rule changes, distinct social effects, and no Hawthorne effects. These and other desirable attributes for empirical work are found in sports settings."

Baller review.
August 4, 2025 at 9:34 AM
Happy birthday 🇨🇭 - you are often abstruse, equally generous as you are insular, yet always beautiful. Beyond Alpine beauty & market liberalism, you are a shining political exemplar with centuries of distributed executive power, universal education & politically engaged citizenry.

shorturl.at/JKmjo
August 1, 2025 at 8:36 AM
Reposted by Rahul Mehrotra
The tragic landslide in Blatten gives me the excuse to tell you the story of how we found out Ice Ages existed. It's a cool story and the most important bit is rather similar to what's happening now.
Aerial view westward over the Blatten deposit and the newly formed lake upstream! 🧊🌊

📷Via Christian Petit/Linkedin
May 29, 2025 at 7:49 PM
Evocative essay on the public vs personal legacies of violence.

Can not help but contrast European experience with others who walked into an 'authoritarian trap,' at least in part driven by demand for protection from future violence. But which instead extends both public and private trauma.
Like so many Europeans, I grew up among people carrying private traumas from World War Two. Eighty years on, this private damage has outlasted the public impact of the war. Me @FinancialTimes. Read here: on.ft.com/4lX60aT
May 3, 2025 at 2:36 PM
Reposted by Rahul Mehrotra
Happy Chungking Express day to those who observe
May 1, 2025 at 11:46 AM
Deeply insightful podcast with Martin Wolf and @baldwinre.bsky.social, inducing strong feelings of déjà vu for Richard's graduate micro/trade lectures.

podcasts.apple.com/ch/podcast/t...
Martin Wolf talks to Richard Baldwin: What’s the future of global trade?
Podcast-Folge · The Economics Show · 24.02.2025 · 36 Min.
podcasts.apple.com
February 25, 2025 at 9:04 AM