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Prof Karthik Muralidharan

Karthik Muralidharan, Ph.D. (Harvard) is an assistant professor in the economics department at the University of California - San Diego, a Faculty Research Fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and a research affiliate of MIT’s Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). His research focuses on improving education and health in developing countries, and includes a widely-cited cross-country study on teacher and medical worker absence in public schools and clinics in developing countries (with a focus on India).

He has also studied the impact of performance-pay for teachers, the impact of contract teachers, and the impact of cash grants to schools on student learning outcomes in India via large-scale randomized evaluations. Current projects include experimental evaluations of the impact of school choice programs in India, and the impact of teacher certification, across the board salary increases for teachers, and continuous teacher training programs in Indonesia.