I’m an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Vanderbilt University. I study comparative politics and the political economy of development, with a regional focus in sub-Saharan Africa.

My research examines the interplay between politics and business. I’m especially interested in how political inequalities translate into economic ones in the form of uneven market participation, access to economic opportunity, and patterns of development. My work draws on extensive fieldwork across Africa and uses field experiments, original surveys, and causal inference with observational data.

My book, Property Rights for Some (under contract with Cambridge University Press), examines how seemingly ordinary political connections lead to the uneven enforcement of rule of law, creating inequalities in market exchange in weak institutional environments. My other research has appeared in outlets including the American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, and the Journal of Modern African Studies, and has received awards including the Michael Wallerstein Award for Best Article in Political Economy and APSA’s Class and Inequality Section Best Paper Award. My field projects have been generously supported by NSF, PEDL, and J-PAL, among others.

I received a Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University and a B.A. in Political Science and African Studies from Northwestern University. I am a faculty affiliate of CSDI and CGD and am a member of EGAP.

I can be reached at abhit.bhandari@vanderbilt.edu, and my CV can be found here.