Kopal Mathur
About Kopal
Ms Mathur holds a Masters of Development Economics from the South Asian University and a Bachelor of Economics (Honours) from the University of Delhi. Her interests are in labour economics and evaluating welfare policies developed while working on her master’s thesis where she researched the prevalence of skills mismatch in the Indian labour market.
Kopal’s research experience includes working on a randomised control trial with Tata Centre for Development at the University of Chicago Trust along with conducting primary surveys in association with other research organisations. While undertaking her PhD studies, Kopal is primarily interested in studying the macroeconomic impact of talent misallocation in the labour market and its policy implications.
Now in her final year of studies, Kopal is open to the job market. For more information visit Kopal’s online portfolio.
Project details
Talent Allocation in the Indian Economy: Measurement and Policy Implications
Various features of the Indian labor market spanning regulation, financial constraints, and social norms naturally translate into a suboptimal allocation of workers' talent across productive units. In turn, such misallocation can lead to significant losses in aggregate productivity, as highlighted by a recent body of research (see Restuccia and Rogerson (2013), or Hopenhayn (2014) for surveys). This project proposes a novel macroeconomic framework to systematically analyze the sources of talent misallocation in the Indian economy. Through those lenses, we aim at improving upon existing methodologies for measuring the misallocation of talent in India, and to evaluate the role of fiscal policy in mitigating such distortions. The project will yield both positive and normative insights, and it is organized around four main components. Component 1 builds a structural model pinning down the possible sources of talent misallocation within the Indian context. Component 2 quantifies the inputs of the model using firm-level data, as well as household level data on wages and occupations. Component 3 computes the relative significance of each of the sources of talent misallocation in India across occupations and sectors. Finally, Component 4 looks at the optimal design of a rich tax-transfers system balancing redistribution and efficiency. For this last component we focus on two main themes: (i) the extent to which productive inefficiencies can be rationalized by redistributive goals, and (ii) the magnitude of the welfare gains from implementing the optimal tax-transfers system.
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