Anirudh Sankar

To understand the many drivers of socio-economic inequality around the world, one must understand its dynamics in anthropologically and sociologically diverse settings. This is a challenge for empirical economics because off-the-shelf approaches may make assumptions that do not properly account for this heterogeneity. In my research, I work with ethnographers, economists, and network scientists to analyze detailed and almost fully complete social networks from these diverse settings. While a grounding in economics brings my research to the frontier of econometric identification and measures of inequality, new methods from network science improve the accuracy of network estimation, and anthropological insights ensure that the analysis accounts for complex sharing-unit structures, norms, and patterns of inheritance.