Joining the SPP resident faculty this year, Assistant Professor Anand Murugesan is curious about how institutions, both formal and informal, influence economic behavior. “In the field of economics, we’ve been good at understanding how markets allocate resources and how incentives affect individual decision-making,” Murugesan explains. “But we are only beginning to explore how prior models with low explanatory power start to perform better when we account for institutions like law, power structures, and culture.”
In a recent co-authored paper, Murugesan studied the area of child adoptions. Considering the effects of globalization and changing technology, he studied the impact that international adoptions in the U.S. has had on children in the U.S. foster care system. In this article, he demonstrates the unintended social consequences of international adoptions on at-risk domestic children.
Currently, Murugesan is continuing to research how institutions and behavior shape each other. One topic that he is exploring is how public opinion and laws relating to same-sex couples are affecting adoptions in the U.S. foster care system. Another line of research explores corruption and extortion related behavior in India.
At SPP, Murugesan will co-teach the innovative CORE curriculum, which brings recent advances in economic thinking into the classroom, with Associate Professor Michael Dorsch. He will also offer elective courses on institutional economics, focusing on the roles of formal and informal institutions, as well as on health, poverty, and development economics.