I am currently a Posdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Warwick. I completed my PhD in Economics from the University of Minnesota in 2026.
My research combines causal inference techniques with structural macroeconomic models to answer fundamental questions about economic growth and inequality.
Email: vermabipul01@gmail.com
Address: S2.89, Department of Economics, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK CV4 7AL
Degrees of Development: General-Equilibrium Effects of Large-Scale Tertiary Education Expansion
[Presented: EGSC 2025 (Washington University in St Louis), Labor Workshop (Duke University), EWMED 2025 (University of Cyprus), Midwest Macro 2026 (Marquette University), SED 2026 (AUEB, Greece)]
Does a large-scale expansion of tertiary education bring economic development? I study this question in India, where the number of colleges and tertiary enrollment both roughly tripled in the decade following the liberalization of private colleges. I find that an increase in a district’s graduate share lowers the agricultural employment share and raises the services share, especially in high-skill services. It also increases GDP per worker and consumption per capita and lowers the college wage premium. In a spatial general-equilibrium model with trade, migration, college choice and college entry, the reform accounts for half of the decade’s rise in the graduate share and 15 percent of the decline in agricultural employment. Removing distance-related barriers to opening colleges, financed by a 0.23 percentage point increase in the tax on graduates’ wages, raises output per worker by 1.83 percent.
College Education and Inequality Across Space with Sang Min Lee
[Presented: SED Winter 2024, Urban Econ Association, USC, U Monash, LAEF-NYU]
Wage inequality across US states has risen since 1980 alongside uneven growth in their college-educated workforces. We show that this uneven growth reflects residents' college attainment rather than migration of the high-skilled. We develop a quantitative spatial model with endogenous college attendance and migration for education and work to quantify the effects of federal and state higher education policies. Had these policies remained at their 1980 levels, the 1980-2019 rise in the standard deviation of log mean wages across states would have been 75 percent larger. Federal policies drive this inequality-reducing effect because they are financed by nationwide taxes, and enrollment in poorer states responds more strongly to tuition reductions. Separately, we evaluate state higher education spending accounting for spatial spillovers: on average, each dollar generates $2.91 in local wage gains a decade later, but net returns are negative where brain drain is severe.
Revisiting Global Income Convergence in 21st Century
Recent research has documented a reversal from divergence to convergence in income levels between rich and poor countries after 2000. This paper employs a growth accounting framework that incorporates heterogeneity in capital income shares–unlike the constant one-third share typically assumed–to investigate global income dynamics over the time period 1980-2019. I find that while output levels began to converge only after 2000, capital (physical and human) had already been converging during 1980-2000. The divergence in total factor productivity (TFP) during this earlier period offset the gains from capital convergence, resulting in little overall income convergence. After 2000, capital maintained its pattern of convergence, and, unlike in the earlier period, TFP also began to converge. Quantitatively, more than half of the convergence between 2000 and 2019—and nearly all the convergence between 1980 and 2019 outside Sub-Saharan Africa—can be attributed to the convergence in capital rather than to improvements in TFP. These findings highlight that factor accumulation has played a much larger role in driving long-run convergence dynamics than previously documented in the literature.
Demography and Structural Transformation with Ruyan Liao
Labor Market Dynamics in Developing Economies with Ravinder
Multi-region Carbon Tax under Time Inconsistency with Honey Batra, Monishankar Bishnu, and Tridip Ray
