Krishna Kumar

Vice President International

RAND, United States

Krishna Kumar (he/him) is vice president, International; Distinguished Chair in International Economic Policy; and a senior economist at the RAND Corporation. He is also a professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School, where he teaches economic development. He previously directed RAND's Labor and Population research unit.

Kumar has led or co-led projects to develop a blueprint for the economic development of North Korea, advance global citizenship in America, find mutually beneficial opportunities for Syrian refugees and host countries in the Middle East, study informal labor markets in Bangladesh, develop a comprehensive model of U.S. labor market inequality, calculate the gross regional product of the Kurdistan Region–Iraq, implement a labor force survey to collect data for the Kurdistan Regional Government to understand the region's unemployment rate, and develop a data collection system. He has conducted a randomized control trial evaluation of an agricultural training program in China to improve farmer decisions and evaluated the socioeconomic impact on the working poor of moving into permanent housing in India. He has also studied the effect of U.S. federal funding of life sciences research on university R&D and commercialization, the role of economic and social policies in Mexico's development, and public policy on Indian entrepreneurship, and conducted a comparative analysis of the Indian and Chinese education systems.

Kumar holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago and has had research published in leading journals focusing on economic growth and development and macroeconomics.