Arun Chandrasekhar is an assistant professor in the economics department at Stanford University. He works on development economics, studying the role that social networks play in developing countries. A social network is a web of connections between units, such as financial relationships between households in a village. Developing countries are marked by a lack well-functioning formal institutions. For instance, village farmers often don't have access to banks, insurance and court systems may not work well. As a consequence, individuals come to rely on their social networks to mediate and facilitate economic interactions. Chandrasekhar is particularly interested in how the economics of networks can help us understand information aggregation failures and breakdown of cooperation in the developing world.

Featured research

• Mapping social networks in India