Affiliated Faculty

<p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">Supreet Kaur is an Associate Professor (with tenure) in the Department of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. A development economist whose work bridges behavioral and labor economics, she conducts rigorous field experiments that illuminate how labor markets function — and malfunction — in poor countries, with particular depth in India and Punjab. Her research has reshaped scholarly understanding of wages, unemployment, inequality, and the cognitive dimensions of poverty, and directly informs policy through partnerships with governments and international development organizations.</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">Kaur earned her B.S. in Operations Research from Columbia University (2004), her M.P.A. in International Development from the Harvard Kennedy School (2007), and her Ph.D. in Political Economy and Government from Harvard University (2012). Before joining UC Berkeley, she was Assistant Professor of Economics at Columbia University (2012–2016).</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">Her research operates along two primary strands. The first examines labor markets in developing countries — documenting frictions, studying the causes of unemployment, and measuring how inequality affects productivity. Her landmark paper "Nominal Wage Rigidity in Village Labor Markets" in the American Economic Review (2019) analyzed rainfall shocks across 600 Indian districts to demonstrate that nominal wages rise during positive shocks but fail to fall during droughts. The resulting distortions reduce employment by nine percent, deepening the impact of downturns on the poorest workers — a finding with significant implications for employment policy in agrarian economies.</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">With Emily Breza and Yogita Shamdasani, Kaur published "The Morale Effects of Pay Inequality" in the Quarterly Journal of Economics (2018), showing through field experiments with Indian manufacturing workers that pay inequality reduces the output and attendance of lower-paid workers. Her forthcoming "The Social Tax: Redistributive Pressure and Labor Supply" (Econometrica, 2025) examines how social pressure to share earnings distorts labor supply, while "Coordination without Organization" (Journal of Political Economy, 2025) reveals how workers in Indian village markets collectively suppress wage undercutting through social enforcement — even without formal organization.</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">The second strand explores how psychological forces shape economic behavior among the poor. With Michael Kremer and Sendhil Mullainathan, she published "Self-Control at Work" as the lead article in the Journal of Political Economy (2015), showing that workers with self-control problems voluntarily chose commitment devices to increase their own productivity. Her co-authored "The Psychology of Poverty: Current and Future Directions" (Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2025) synthesizes the field's understanding of how cognitive constraints perpetuate poverty cycles.</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">Kaur's work carries direct policy impact. As Scientific Director of the Psychology and Economics of Poverty Initiative at the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA), she leads research translating behavioral insights into actionable interventions. In partnership with the Government of Punjab and J-PAL South Asia, she and collaborator Aprajit Mahajan developed a fourteen-week school-based drug prevention program targeting the opioid crisis among young men in rural Punjab — where estimated usage rates reach fifteen percent among those aged 18 to 35. Their research uncovered widespread mistaken beliefs about addiction and recovery, informing a curriculum designed to correct these misconceptions at scale.</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">Kaur is a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a Research Affiliate of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), an Affiliated Professor at J-PAL, and a member of the Executive Committee of the Institute for South Asia Studies at UC Berkeley. She has received the David A. Wells Prize from the Harvard Economics Department (2012), the Distinguished CESifo Affiliate Award in Behavioural Economics (2015), and the National Science Foundation CAREER Award (2019–2024).</p> <p class="font-claude-response-body break-words whitespace-normal leading-[1.7]">Her scholarship demonstrates that economic challenges facing South Asian communities — from wage rigidity in Indian agriculture to opioid addiction in Punjab — are not merely local problems but windows into fundamental questions about how markets, norms, and cognition interact to perpetuate or alleviate poverty. Her combination of methodological rigor, field-based evidence from the subcontinent, and direct policy engagement makes her work essential to understanding economic life in Punjab and across the developing world.</p>