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Saumitra Jha

Associate Professor of Political Economy at the GSB, Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute, at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research & Associate Professor, by courtesy, of Political Science and of Economics

BioSaumitra Jha is an Associate Professor of Political Economy at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, and by courtesy, of Economics and of Political Science. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law in the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Affairs and convenes the Stanford Conflict and Polarization Lab.

Saumitra holds a BA from Williams College, master’s degrees in economics and mathematics from the University of Cambridge, and a PhD in economics from Stanford University. Prior to joining the GSB, he was an Academy Scholar at Harvard University. He has been a Center Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, as well as of the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance and the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University. He was voted Teacher of the Year by the students of the Stanford GSB Sloan Fellow Class of 2020. He received the Michael Wallerstein Award for best published article in Political Economy from the American Political Science Association in 2014 for his research on ethnic tolerance and his co-authored work on Heroes was awarded the 2020 Oliver Williamson Best Paper Award from the Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics.