Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Vanderbilt University.
I research topics related to business and politics, firms, and economic development in Africa. My work investigates how political inequalities shape economic exchange, business, and formal and informal institutions. I conduct the majority of my fieldwork in Senegal and have also worked on projects in Niger, Mozambique, The Gambia, Tunisia, and Morocco. I use a mixture of large-scale field experiments, original surveys with survey experiments, qualitative interviews, and fine-grained observational data in my research.
My research has been supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, the NSF DDRIG, CEPR-DFID’s Private Enterprise Development in Low-Income Countries (PEDL) initiative, J-PAL’s Governance Initiative, and the Social Science Research Council, among others. I am a member of EGAP.
I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University, and was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST). I previously worked for the West African headquarters of the UN World Food Programme, and received a B.A. in Political Science and African Studies from Northwestern University.
I can be reached at abhit.bhandari@vanderbilt.edu.
