Vijayendra Biju Rao

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

ABOUT VIJAYENDRA BIJU RAO

I am a development economist who works at the intersection of scholarship and practice, using mixed methods to study power, voice, and collective action in everyday life—within households, communities, and democratic institutions. I am currently visiting Northwestern University as the Roberta Buffett Distinguished Scholar-Practitioner in Residence.Until June 2026, I am Lead Economist in the Development Research Group at the World Bank. I chair the Advisory Committee of the Boundaries, Membership, and Belonging program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) and am a Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for Global Development.My work bridges economics with anthropology, sociology, and political science, and has been published in leading journals across economics, political science, sociology, and development studies. I study development as it is lived rather than imagined in policy, with a focus on how institutions, culture, and power shape agency and inequality.This agenda has taken me from research on dowries, domestic violence, and sex work to work on consumption, decentralization, community-driven development, and deliberative democracy. A consistent thread is an effort to make development economics more empirically grounded, context-sensitive, and attentive to narrative and meaning.More recently, I have been using natural language processing and large language models to analyze large-scale qualitative interviews, studying aspirations, well-being, and voice in ways that complement—and sometimes challenge—standard quantitative approaches.After leaving the World Bank, I will work as an independent scholar and practitioner, writing, teaching, and collaborating across disciplines and institutions.