Economics graduate from Aryabhatta College (University of Delhi) and M1 student in Applied Economics at Toulouse School of Economics (TSE), interested in climate change economics and applied and structural econometrics. My research examines how institutions, governance, and human behavior shape environmental outcomes. My undergraduate thesis studies the long-term relationship between carbon emissions and regional integration in Africa.
Undergraduate Thesis: Carbon Emissions in Africa: EKC and Regional Integration
The thesis uses a panel of nine African countries — Algeria, Kenya, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, and Zambia — from 2006 to 2022 to answer two interconnected questions.
Paper 1: Does regional integration affect carbon emissions in Africa? Integration is measured through regional value chains, environmental co-operation, and institutional ties. The paper uses fully modified OLS, which handles cross-sectional dependence (CSD), non-stationarity, and endogeneity, and finds the variables are cointegrated, moving together over the long run. Trade openness and regional value chains raise consumption-based emissions: in lower-income economies, people buy imported goods despite the environmental cost. Environmental co-operation and institutional integration push in the opposite direction, bringing emissions down; better trade deals seem to help countries pollute less. Government effectiveness matters here as well; where governments implement policy well, emissions fall. GDP and per-capita energy use both raise emissions, so development still runs on emission-intensive activity.
Paper 2: The second paper tests for an Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) across African countries with very different environmental profiles. Using a group-mean fully modified OLS estimator, it again controls for cross-sectional dependence, non-stationarity, and endogeneity. The results confirm a long-run cointegrating relationship with heterogeneous slopes, but the shape is unexpected. Instead of the conventional inverted U, emissions trace a U: carbon per capita falls as income rises, then climbs past a certain threshold. The estimates also show an almost one-to-one elasticity between energy use per capita and carbon emissions per capita, pointing to heavy reliance on carbon-intensive energy. Without structural change in the energy mix, further growth may deepen environmental degradation, which makes clean-energy transition a pressing policy priority for the region.
Supervisor: Prof. Deepika Goel | Aug 2025 – May 2026 | Presented at UGREE 2026 (University of Delhi, April 22–23, 2026) | Thesis: 10/10 (top of department)
Implemented a Salant (1976)/Hotelling (1931) resource-extraction model with a cartel and competitive fringe, then extended it to T periods with a corner-correct complementarity fringe. Carbon-tax experiments reproduce the green-paradox channel: a rising tax path increases early extraction.
Modeled short-run dynamics between exchange rate, inflation, and output gap using a Vector Autoregression (VAR) model with robust inference in R.
Tested how Consumer Price Index and output gap movements affect the INR exchange rate using time series models in R, and discussed the policy implications.
Interactive dashboard visualizing and analyzing university ranking data.