About

Deepankar Basu is a professor at the Department of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a member of the Computational Social Science Institute. His research focuses on economic development issues in India, particularly examining undernutrition, health status, health systems, and the condition of informal employment and enterprises. He utilizes data from large-scale, nationally representative consumer expenditure surveys conducted by the National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO) to analyze various aspects of undernutrition and health, including the calorie consumption puzzle, the public distribution system, and changes in consumption patterns across different regions, social groups, and income levels. Additionally, he investigates the impact of income inequality and public health provisioning on health outcomes across states. His work also extends to understanding the informal sector through firm-level data from the NSSO's Survey of Unorganized Manufacturing Enterprises, focusing on the determinants and impacts of subcontracting relationships in India.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Geography
• Political Science
• Medicine
• Demography
• Virology
• Mathematics
• Econometrics
• Development economics
• Economics
• Statistics
• Religious studies
• Environmental health
• Political economy
• Law

Selected publications

• Alternative approaches to labor values and prices of production: Theory and evidence

  Structural Change and Economic Dynamics · 2026-03-12

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Theory and Empirics of the Goodwin Model

  Metroeconomica · 2026-02-18

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT The Goodwin model, based on a system of two nonlinear differential equations, offers a parsimonious model of business cycle fluctuations in capitalist economies. In this paper, we offer two simple proofs that solution trajectories are closed orbits. We also conduct empirical analyses with annual data for 54 postwar business cycles across 15 OECD economies. We find that the qualitative predictions of the model about the direction of cycles is largely valid; we find the quantitative predictions of the model are very good for the employment rate but less so for the wage share.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• An Analytical History of the Yule-Frisch-Waugh-Lovell Theorem

  Eastern Economic Journal · 2026-03-26

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Economic Inequality in India over the Last Three Decades: A Tale of Two Data Sources

  Economic and political weekly/Economic & political weekly · 2025-11-30

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In this paper, I discuss the evolution of economic inequality over the past three decades in India. I use two different data sources for the analysis: distribution of consumption expenditure data from published NSS reports and distribution of pre-tax national income data from the website of the World Inequality Database (WID). In comparison to WID, NSS data not only underestimates the level of inequality at any point in time, but it can also give an erroneous picture about the change in inequality over time. By failing to adequately capture the income or expenditure distribution, NSS data paints a misleading picture about economic inequality. Researchers should use caution before exclusively using NSS consumption expenditure data for the analysis of economic inequality in India.

  PublisherDOI

• ovbsa: Sensitivity Analysis of Omitted Variable Bias

  2025-05-06

  datasetOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Conduct sensitivity analysis of omitted variable bias in linear econometric models using the methodology presented in Basu (2025) &lt;<a href="https://doi.org/10.2139%2Fssrn.4704246" target="_top">doi:10.2139/ssrn.4704246</a>&gt;.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A Frisch-Waugh-Lovell-Type Theorem for GMM Using Oblique Projections

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Labor Intensification and Value Production: A Rejoinder

  Review of Radical Political Economics · 2024-06-13 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In this note, we provide a rejoinder to Rieu (2024), which had presented a critical commentary on our analysis of the intensification of labor in Basu, Haas, and Moraitis (2024). JEL Classification: B51, C02

  PublisherDOI

• Technical Change and the Rate of Profit in Classical-Marxian Models of Economic Growth

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• How Likely Is It That Omitted Variable Bias Will Overturn Your Results?

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• A Neoclassical Theory of Labor Exploitation: Some Comments

  Review of Radical Political Economics · 2024-11-10

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In this note, we comment on two aspects of the analysis presented in Eswaran’s article “The Nature of Labor’s Vulnerability to Exploitation.” First, we compare Eswaran’s neoclassical views of labor exploitation with the standard Marxian understanding of labor exploitation. Second, we delve deeper into Eswaran’s model and raise a set of questions about his analysis. JEL Classification: P12, J22, B14

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Debarshi Das

  University College London

  15 shared

• Amit Basole

  13 shared

• Kartik Misra

  Sewanee: The University of the South

  4 shared

• Priyanka Srivastava

  Sarala Birla University

  4 shared

• Cameron B. Haas

  National Cancer Institute

  3 shared

• Ramaa Vasudevan

  3 shared

• Manya Budhiraja

  2 shared

• Ying Chen

  2 shared

Labs

• Computational Social Science InstitutePI

  The lab focuses on computational social science research.