Introducing Stone Centre PhD Scholar Vrinda Anand

Vrinda Anand is one of the four Stone PhD Scholars joining the Stone Centre in 2026/2027.

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We asked Vrinda how a planned career in media analytics turned into economics research, and why so many workers in India remain in informal and self-employed work.

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Could you tell us a little about your academic background and how you came to economics?

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My path into economics was straightforward. I first took economics as an elective in high school and was intrigued by how the discipline used relatively simple frameworks around supply and demand, incentives, and equilibrium to study not just financial markets and the economy in the traditional sense, but also things like voting behaviour, marriage markets, and peer groups. This broader applicability of economics drew me to the subject, and I decided to study it in college. I went to New York University, where I double-majored in Economics and Media Studies and then did an MSc in Economics at the LSE.

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What made you want to do a PhD, and was there a particular question or moment that drew you to your topic?

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My path into economics research was anything but straightforward. Throughout college, my plan was to get a job in media analytics after graduation. That changed in my junior year, when I took Guido Menzio’s course Markets with Frictions and read the paper “A Theory of Fads, Fashion, Custom, and Cultural Change as Informational Cascades” by Bikhchandani, Hirshleifer, and Welch for the first time. The paper gave me a formal framework to think about things I was encountering in my media studies classes — populism, political polarisation, how opinion spreads — and showed me that echo chambers aren’t just a cultural phenomenon but something you can model: they form because people rationally follow the crowd when their own information is thin, and for the same reason they are surprisingly fragile. It was after that class that I started thinking seriously about graduate school.

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I wrote my honors thesis under Debraj Ray, where I spent a year extending a dataset of communal riots in India and studying how elections and riots shaped people’s economic lives. Building the data meant reading, district by district, how conflict between groups played out on the ground, and the question that stayed with me was how it affected people’s long-run labour market outcomes — did it drive people away from or towards certain jobs? Did employers treat equally qualified workers from different groups differently? That’s still the question I’m working on.

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How would you explain your research to someone outside economics in a few sentences?

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I study how tensions between different social groups in developing countries push marginalised minorities into insecure, precarious work and how being stuck in those jobs can, in turn, marginalise them further.

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What drew you to the question of why workers in developing economies end up in self-employment and informal jobs, and what do you expect to find?

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I grew up in India, which has been among the fastest-growing economies in the world for decades yet still has most of its workforce in the informal sector — working precarious, marginal jobs with little mobility, or running one-person, subsistence-level firms that never grow. Standard models of structural transformation predict that as a country grows, small unproductive firms should give way and their workers should be absorbed into higher-quality, regular jobs. Why that hasn’t happened for ordinary people in India is a question I’ve carried for years, so when I started the PhD it was an obvious place to begin, since there is still so much we don’t know about the informal sector and self-employment.

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The firm-side evidence is well established: hiring formally in India is costly and hard to reverse due to regulation, contracting, and information frictions. I expect to find that the worker side of the story matters too, and that social norms and group relationships play a larger role than aggregate data lets us see. There is compelling evidence from rural India showing that occupational choice responds to things such as caste-linked occupational identity, community wage norms, and the social cost of being seen to deviate. My expectation is that similar forces continue to matter even as workers migrate to cities, where labour markets are more anonymous, operating instead through employers’ beliefs about workers from other groups and workers’ expectations of how employers and coworkers will treat them. My ongoing work on India tests this: preliminary patterns suggest Muslims exposed to communal violence are more likely to end up self-employed, concentrated among cohorts entering after the early 1990s when the private sector started expanding. If that holds, self-employment is not only a residual of workers waiting for jobs that do not yet exist; some are there because social frictions make existing jobs harder to get or less worth taking. Then, from a policy standpoint, creating good jobs obviously remains the first-order need, but unless these frictions are also addressed, many of those jobs will stay out of reach for the workers who need them most.

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How do you think referral networks and discrimination might shape who gets access to which jobs, and why does that matter for inequality between groups?

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Referral networks are useful to firms — a referred worker arrives pre-vetted, and referrers have reputational stakes in whom they bring in, which eases both screening and moral-hazard problems. For workers, though, referrals are self-reinforcing. Who you know matters a great deal for labour market outcomes even in rich countries; in societies divided along ethnic or religious lines, where groups already differ in their access to good jobs, the effect is magnified. Theory and evidence both show that referral-based hiring can produce inequality traps: because people refer those like themselves, workers get sorted into group-specific networks with little overlap, and a group that starts out poorly connected to good jobs tends to stay that way.

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The deeper problem is that this kind of segregation feeds discrimination through both of the classic channels. If employers rarely hire from a group, they rarely learn about its workers, so statistical discrimination has little chance to correct itself. And if workers from different groups rarely interact, there is no contact through which taste-based prejudice might erode. Access to jobs then shapes attitudes, which shape access — and inequality between groups becomes self-sustaining rather than a one-off gap that growth can close.

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What are you hoping to get out of being part of the Stone Centre community, and what would you like to have achieved by the end of your PhD?

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The Stone Centre is a great place to engage with other researchers thinking about questions of group inequalities, discrimination, and informal labour markets. I’m hoping to share my research with the wider community, learn from others working on related questions, and get feedback on my ideas and projects.

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Thanks to the Stone Centre grant, I will also be able to collect some on-the-ground data on self-employment, which is an important next step in my research. By the end of my PhD, I hope to have developed this project further and have a better understanding of how social divisions shape who ends up in self-employment, who gets access to good jobs, and what that means for inequality between groups.

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