Biography

Canishk is a PhD student in the Economics Department working on topics in behavioural public economics. His main research goal is to find out how to design social protection policies which are fair, inclusive and which maximise societal well-being. In a project together with Neil Thakral at Brown, he analyses public housing allocation policies in the US and UK to see how much, and in what ways, restricting choice improves social welfare, and whether this is robust to applicant biases. He is also researching the extent to which people with poor mental health in the Netherlands are being screened out from receiving social assistance due to the administrative burden associated with take-up. His other main interest is to understand the welfare effects of nudges. Together with Daniel Reck at UMD, he is looking to answer the question “should we default people into saving more?” using a variety of methods to compute welfare including subjective well-being. He is also interested in the political support for nudges and the extent to which the public think they are manipulative. Canishk completed his BA in Mathematics at the University of Cambridge and has an MSc in Applicable Mathematics from the LSE. Before the PhD, he was an Economist at The Behaviouralist, a behavioural science research consultancy. There, he worked on projects to estimate treatment effects of early childhood education interventions, as well as designed RCTs to study the effect of communications on the take-up of energy efficient home improvements.

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