SPP Assistant Professor Anand Murugesan is spending this summer in India conducting research that combines ethnographic and experimental evidence for an interdisciplinary project that has been funded by CEU's Intellectual Themes Initiative. "The focus of our work," explains Murugesan, "is to examine the beliefs that foster dishonest or cooperative behavior across cultures. I am collaborating with cognitive scientists, anthropologists, and sociologists at CEU on this project. This summer, we are conducting pilot economic experiments examining contributions to public goods under different institutions, such as democratic vs. meritocratic basis for selecting leaders."
The research Murugesan is conducting in India is directly related to several of the elective courses he teaches at SPP: Health, Poverty, and Development and Culture, Institutions, and Economic Development. Murugesan says that students in these classes "also analyze development issues from behavioral economics and institutional economics perspectives. The public goods experiments we are conducting in India are essentially looking at issues at this intersection – beliefs that different institutional frameworks trigger leading to cooperative norms of contributing high levels or, in some cases, little or nothing, to public goods. Understanding such triggers and beliefs helps explain, for example, free riding on public transport in Budapest and the garbage management problem in Bangalore – and informs policy making to address these types of issues."
Murugesan, who is the program director of SPP's two-year Master of Public Administration (MPA) program, is making student recruitment presentations at universities in the Bangalore area: St. Joseph's College Bangalore, Christ University, and National Law School of India University. He has also visited the School For Democracy and Mazdoor Kisan Shakhti Sangathan at Rajasthan to strengthen SPP's ties with organizations actively working on public policy issues in India. SPP student Gaspar Garcia Huidobro Rodriguez (MPA 2017) and alumna Ursula Sanchez (MPA 2016) are also interning at Mazdoor Kisan Shakhti Sangathan, which was co-founded by Aruna Roy, who gave a public lecture at SPP in spring 2016. Roy will be a George Soros Visiting Practitioner Chair at SPP in spring 2017.
SPP enjoys connections with other universities in India as well including Azim Premji University (APU) where Murugesan has lectured on several occasions. SPP and APU are two of the more than a dozen universities that are piloting the INET Core Economics curriculum around the world.