Krishna B. Kumar

Biography

Krishna Kumar is director of RAND Labor and Population and has directed Research And Policy in International Development (RAPID), a center within the unit. He also leads the Rosenfeld Program on Asian Development at PRGS, where he co-teaches a course on economic development. His research interests are: economic growth and development, human capital formation, and technological change. His current projects include: examining the role of NIH/federal funding on university R&D and university-firm alliance formation (funded by NSF), using a randomized controlled trial to evaluate the effectiveness of farmer field schools to reduce excessive fertilizer usage by Chinese farmers (funded by 3ie), and building capacity at the Kurdistan Region Statistical Office through the implementation of a labor force survey (funded by the Kurdistan Regional Government). His current proposals include: examining the factors beyond academic preparedness that influence STEM enrollment and persistence in U.S. universities, understanding the aggregation of individual values into corporate and national governance, and their transmission across developed-developing country boundaries through investment and trade, and calculating the gross domestic product of the Kurdistan Region using enterprise surveys. He has published in leading journals on economic growth and development and macroeconomics. He has received the Huddleson teacher award from PRGS, and the President's award, and silver and gold merit awards from RAND. Kumar received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago.