Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Vanderbilt University.
I study the political economy of development, with a focus on the intersection of politics, business, and economic development in Africa. My research examines how political dynamics shape inequalities in economic participation and access to opportunity. I am especially interested in political connections, the functioning of the private sector, and the interplay between formal and informal institutions. My work draws on extensive fieldwork across Africa and employs experimental methods, original surveys, and causal inference with observational data.
My work has been supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, the NSF DDRIG, CEPR-DFID’s Private Enterprise Development in Low-Income Countries (PEDL) initiative, J-PAL’s Governance Initiative, and the Social Science Research Council, among others. I am a member of EGAP.
I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from Columbia University and was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse (IAST). I previously worked for the West African headquarters of the UN World Food Programme, and received a B.A. in Political Science and African Studies from Northwestern University.
I can be reached at abhit.bhandari@vanderbilt.edu.
