Welcome! I am an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. I am a scholar of inequality, distribution, and democracy, with a focus on the politics of welfare, state-business relations, and India. My CV is available here. In case you would like to get in touch, you can reach me at gnair@hks.harvard.edu.

I conduct research in comparative and international political economy. I am completing a book, titled Retail State: The Politics of Consumption Welfare in India and Beyond. Some of my other research is published or accepted in the Journal of Politics, International Organization, Comparative Political Studies, Perspectives on Politics, PNAS Nexus, and IMF Economic Review, among other journals. This work has been supported by competitive grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the NSF-funded Time-Sharing Experiments in the Social Sciences, the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University, and Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Stone Center for Inequality and Wealth Distribution, and Mittal South Asia Institute.

At Harvard Kennedy School, I teach the core course on the political economy of development in the Masters in Public Administration/International Development, as well as an elective on politics and policy in South Asia. I serve as a co-chair of the Weatherhead Research Cluster on Business and Government. I am a faculty affiliate of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation and the Center for International Development at HKS, as well as the Institute for Quantitative Social Science and the Stone Program in Wealth Distribution, Inequality, and Social Policy. Born and raised in India, I received my PhD from Yale University.