Rikhil Bhavnani

Professor Bhavnani’s research and teaching focus on inequalities in political representation, the political economy of migration, and the political economy of development. His research is particularly concerned with causal identification, and is focused on South Asia. Bhavnani is the co-author, with Bethany Lacina, of a book on the nativist or “sons-of-the-soil” reaction to within-country migration across the developing world, forthcoming at Cambridge University Press. His papers have been published or are forthcoming in the American Political Science Review, Journal of Politics, World Politics, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, the British Journal of Political Science and the Economic Journal, among others.

Prior to starting at UW–Madison, Professor Bhavnani was a visiting fellow at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University. He has worked at the Center for Global Development and the International Monetary Fund, and received a PhD in political science and an MA in economics from Stanford University, and a BA in political science and economics from Yale University.