While I am primarily an Economist by training, my research draws on insights from Philosophy, Sociology and Built Environment to try to answer some big questions about how our world is organised and how we can make it better.

Drawing on the Philosopher Henri Lefebvre’s radical idea of social space and Brian Larkin’s politics and poetics of infrastructure, my recent work untangles the often complicated and tangled relationships between operation of markets, the space it operates on and the underlying infrastructure that supports that space.

• My research on markets explores the nature of the space over which markets can operate efficiently and reveals numerous counter-intuitive insights about the basic foundations of markets in the real and the virtual worlds.
• My research on infrastructure explore the role vital role infrastructure plays in shaping the space and making it conducive for economic and social activities.

My research on automation explores the frictions that create mismatch between workers’ skills and the skill’s that firms’ demand.

My research on economic growth incorporates the roles of infrastructure in modern economic growth and explores the vital role it can plays driving and shaping economic development.

My research on Microfinance explores how Microfinance Institutions can be designed to create new social capital that can then be leveraged to alleviate financial constraints of the poor. These papers explore how ability of Microfinance Institutions to target the poorest of the poor can be enhanced through the following two mechanisms.

• Sequential group lending where the group members are allocated credit sequentially instead of simultaneously and
• the Microfinance Institutions explicitly introduce compulsory savings in the group lending.

As an educator, I am passionate about making economics accessible and relevant to everyday life. I have designed and taught a wide range of Economics courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, consistently receiving strong student and peer evaluations.

In addition to my academic and teaching roles, I have contributed to academic governance and the administration of higher education institutions in the UK.

If you are interested in brainstorming, collaborating or simply exchanging ideas, I would love to hear from you. You could email me at <kumar.aniket [at] gmail.com>.