Krishna Kumar (PhD, Economics, The University of Chicago) is a Senior Economist at RAND, and is the Director of its Labor and Population unit, whose mission is to improve socio-economic wellbeing around the world through research and analysis. He also leads the Rosenfeld Program on Asian Development at the Pardee RAND Graduate School (PRGS), where he teaches a course on macroeconomic development. He is co-leading projects to understand the nexus between informal and formal labor markets in Bangladesh (funded by IZA-DFID), and to calculate the gross regional product of the Kurdistan Region—Iraq. He has also co-led or worked on projects to implement a labor force survey to collect data for the Kurdistan Regional Government to understand the region’s unemployment rate, develop a data collection system, and recommend strategies to develop the private sector in that region. He recently conducted a randomized control trial (RCT) evaluation, funded by 3ie, of an agricultural training program in China to improve farmer decisions and evaluating the socio-economic impact on the working poor of moving into permanent housing in India, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. He has also studied the role of economic and social policies in Mexico’s development, public policy on Indian entrepreneurship, and conducted a comparative analysis of the Indian and Chinese education systems. His research has been published in leading journals in economic growth and development and macroeconomics.

He joined IZA as a Research Fellow in January 2015.