Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Vanderbilt University.
I specialize in comparative politics and the political economy of development. My primary strand of research investigates how political inequalities shape economic exchange, business, and formal and informal institutions, with a regional focus in Africa. I have conducted fieldwork in Senegal, Niger, Mozambique, and The Gambia, and have implemented large-scale field experiments, original surveys and survey experiments, qualitative interviews, and fine-grained observational data collection.
My research 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 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.
