About

Nirvikar Singh is a Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), where he currently serves as Co-Director of the Center for Analytical Finance, an institution he founded. From 2010 to 2020, he held the Sarbjit Singh Aurora Chair of Sikh and Punjabi Studies at UCSC and has also directed the UCSC South Asian Studies Initiative. His academic leadership roles at UCSC have included Director of the Santa Cruz Center for International Economics, Co-Director of the Center for Global, International and Regional Studies, and Special Advisor to the Chancellor. In the 1990s, he organized one of the first major U.S. conferences on Indian economic reform, highlighting his longstanding engagement with economic issues related to India. He earned his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, and his BSc and MSc from the London School of Economics, where he was awarded the Allyn Young Prize, Gonner Prize, and Ely Devons Prize. Professor Singh's research spans a broad range of topics including entrepreneurship, information technology and development, electronic commerce, business strategy, political economy, federalism, economic growth, the Indian economy, and Sikh and Punjabi studies. He has contributed over 100 research papers and has co-authored or co-edited six books covering subjects such as joint ventures, international investment, technology transfer, federalism in India, the Indian IT revolution, and the economic transformation of Punjab. Beyond academia, he has served as an advisor to several startups and knowledge services firms in Silicon Valley and India. His expertise has also been recognized through his service on advisory groups to the Finance Minister of India on G-20 matters, as a consultant to the Chief Economic Adviser of the Ministry of Finance in India, and as a member of the Expert Group on post-Covid-19 economic recovery formed by the Chief Minister of Punjab state in India.

Research topics

• Economics
• Business
• Econometrics
• Statistics
• Natural resource economics
• Finance
• Environmental economics
• Engineering

Selected publications

• Economics, Religion and Public Policy

  WORLD SCIENTIFIC eBooks · 2025-06-15

  bookSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Economics, Religion and Public Policy

  WORLD SCIENTIFIC eBooks · 2025-06-15

  bookSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Prospects for Punjab's Economic Development

  2025-12-29

  book-chapterSenior author

  This chapter analyzes possibilities for reviving Punjab’s struggling economy, characterized by slow growth, social unrest, and environmental degradation. The state’s overdependence on growing wheat and paddy for the national food procurement system is identified as the primary reason for these problems, and we argue that any prospects for meaningful economic development depend on collaboration between the state and national governments, including fiscal support from the latter to deal with switching costs and accumulated fiscal issues created by the current system. We also discuss specifics such as agricultural diversification, industrial development and innovation, cross-border services, and decentralization to the local level.

  PublisherDOI

• Economics, Religion and Public Policy

  WORLD SCIENTIFIC eBooks · 2025-06-15

  bookSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Economics, Religion and Public Policy

  WORLD SCIENTIFIC eBooks · 2025-06-15

  bookSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Seeking a Just Economy: A Perspective from the Sikh Tradition

  Journal of Economics Management and Religion · 2025-08-15

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This paper engages with the ideas of Anthony Annett in Cathonomics: How Catholic Tradition Can Create A More Just Economy by elucidating Sikh traditions of conceiving and enacting various aspects of economic and social justice, including the promotion of human rights, reducing inequality, allowing for pluralism and environmental protection. It also touches on broader issues embedded in the difference between ‘religious economics’ and the ‘economics of religion’, the role of religious reasons in public discourse, and underlying conditions of power.

  PublisherDOI

• Theories of governance and development: How does India’s experience fit?

  India Review · 2024-08-07 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This paper takes on the apparent paradox of India’s combination of durable democracy, capable bureaucracy, but a deficient development trajectory. It begins by outlining the nature of the problem. Then it summarizes and compares some significant approaches to drawing connections from governance institutions to development outcomes. Next, it reviews some of the contributions to understanding India’s political economy in the last few decades. Finally, it attempts to draw some lessons from India’s experience for the application of different theories of governance and development. The central lesson is that the paradox recedes when attention is paid to the subnational level, where India’s states encompass considerable variation in initial societal and economic conditions and in development outcomes.

  PublisherDOI

• Religion-making in South Asia: An interstitial perspective

  The Indian Economic & Social History Review · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The study of ‘Hinduism’ in contemporary academia has generated considerable controversy. Many scholars have argued that the idea of a single ancient religion is difficult to substantiate based on the historical record. A common alternative position is that Hinduism is a colonial construct, without well-defined historical antecedents. This paper contributes to a scholarly middle ground, which provides an empirically based yet still contingent analysis of the evolution of ‘Hinduism’, by drawing on evidence from the Sikh tradition. In doing so, it also draws on approaches which interpret Islam as a discursive tradition, subject to contestable representations, shaped by conditions of knowledge and power, as well as by collective aspirations. Sikh attempts at self-definition included distinguishing their tradition from the two larger, pre-existing traditions of Muslims and Hindus in an explicit and self-conscious manner. In doing so, Sikh leaders recognised ‘Hindu’ as a religious category to some degree, well before the colonial period.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Quantifying Specific and Systemic Factors in the Black-White Wealth Gap in the United States

  Journal of Economics Race and Policy · 2024-11-07

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract This paper provides a new quantitative analysis of the role of specific and systemic factors in racial wealth disparities in the United States. Specific or individual factors include characteristics such as education, occupation, homeownership, and inheritance. Systemic factors can be reflected in unexplained racial differences, or by considering the effect of differences in characteristics when taken together. Utilizing the 2016 Survey of Consumer Finances and different approaches to estimating the effects of various characteristics, we argue that measured individual characteristics are limited in their ability to explain much of the Black-White wealth gap in the US. Quantile regressions find that the racial wealth gap exists within comparable segments of the wealth distribution, and also suggest that race matters, beyond measured characteristics.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Impacts of the COVID-19 Lockdown on Consumption: Household Data from India

  Asian Development Review · 2023-08-12 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  We quantify the impacts on consumption expenditure and the patterns following India’s initial sudden lockdown in response to the coronavirus disease pandemic and the gradual relaxation that followed. We use household survey data from a representative Indian state, Punjab. We separate the effects between rural versus urban households, and whether the households were female headed or had daily laborers. While the urban population cut back expenditure across all categories, rural households shifted toward basic commodities and cut back more on other expenditure. Rural households that included daily-wage laborers were the most severely affected.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Intergovernment Grants with Asymmetric Information

  NSF · $25k · 1986–1987

Frequent coauthors

• Daniel Friedman

  27 shared

• M. Govinda Rao

  25 shared

• Michael M. Hutchison

  20 shared

• Jake Kendall

  University of Washington

  16 shared

• Steven T. Anderson

  Mater Research

  13 shared

• Garrett Milam

  University of Puget Sound

  12 shared

• Rajeswari Sengupta

  Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research

  11 shared

• Anirban Sanyal

  11 shared

Awards & honors

• Allyn Young Prize
• Gonner Prize
• Ely Devons Prize