NRI Kaushik Basu has been
nominated for Padma Bhushan, 2008
New Delhi, Jan 26, 2008
Surinder Malhotra/ Gary Singh, LA
Kaushik Basu, C. Marks Professor
of International Studies and Professor of Economics and Director,
Program on Comparative Economic Development at Cornell University
has been awarded Padma Bhushan, 2008
Kaushik Basu was born in Calcutta and received his
early education there, at St. Xavier's School. In 1969 he moved
to Delhi to do his undergraduate studies in Economics from St.
Stephen's College and then he went on to the London School of
Economics, from where he received his M.Sc. (Econ) in 1974 and
PhD in 1976. He did his Ph.D. under the supervision of Amartya
Sen, Nobel laureate in the area of choice theory and welfare economics.
Over the years Kaushik Basu has held visiting positions at the
Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), CORE (Louvain-la-Neuve)
and the London School of Economics (where he was Distinguished
Visitor in 1993); he has been Visiting Professor at MIT, Harvard
and Princeton; and Visiting Scientist at the Indian Statistical
Institute. A Fellow of the Econometric Society and recipient of
the Mahalanobis Memorial Medal, Kaushik Basu has published scientific
papers in development economics, game theory, industrial organization
and political economy, and crafted the traveler's dilemma[1] He
is a columnist for BBC News Online, and for the Times of India,
and is the author of several books on economics and a play, Crossings
at Benaras Junction, which was published in The Little Magazine
(vol. 6, 2005). In 1992 he founded the Centre for Development
Economics (CDE) at the Delhi School of Economics, Delhi, and was
the Centre's first Executive Director till 1996.
He is the editor of the Oxford Companion to Economics in India,
published by Oxford University Press (February, 2007), which is
a compendium on the Indian economy, with contributors that include
P. Chidambaram (Finance Minister of India), Amartya Sen, and leading
industrialists Ratan Tata, and N.R. Narayana Murthy. Kaushik Basu
is Editor of Social Choice and Welfare, Associate Editor of Japanese
Economic Review and is on the Board of Editors of the World Bank
Economic Review.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
"Child Labor: Cause, Consequence and Cure with Remarks on
International Labor Standards," Journal of Economic Literature,
September 1999; "Interlinkage, Limited Liability, and Strategic
Interaction," (with C. Bell and P. Bose), Journal of Economic
Behavior and Organization, forthcoming, June 1998; "The Economics
of Child Labor," (with Pham H. Van), American Economic Review,
June 1998; Analytical Development Economics: The Less Developed
Economy Revisited, M.I.T. Press, 1998; "On Misunderstanding
Government: An Analysis of the Art of Policy Advice," Economics
and Politics, 1997; "Group Rationality, Utilitarianism and
Escher's Waterfall," Games and Economic Behavior, 1994; Lectures
in Industrial Organization Theory, Basil Blackwell, 1993; "Notes
on Bribery and the Control of Corruption," (with S. Bhattacharya
and A. Mishra), Journal of Public Economics, 1992; "Fragmented
Duopoly: Theory and Applications to Backward Agriculture,"
(with C. Bell), Journal of Development Economics, 1991; The Less
Developed Economy: A Critique of Contemporary Theory, second reprint
Oxford University, 1990; "On the Nonexistence of a Rationality
Definition for Extensive Games," International Journal of
Game Theory, 1990; "Technological Stagnation, Tenurial Laws
and Adverse Selection," American Economic Review, 1989; "A
Decomposition of the Normalization Axiom," Econometrica,
1985.
CURRENT RESEARCH
Political economy; knowledge and rationality; labor markets in
developing economies.
