Bio
I am PhD student in the Economics Department at the London School of Economics and Political Science with interests in public and behavioural economics.
My LSE webpage is here, and my email is c.naik@lse.ac.uk.
I have a BA in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge and an MSc in Applicable Mathematics from the LSE. Before the PhD, I was an Economist at The Behaviouralist, a behavioural science research consultancy.
My primary research goal is to analyse how governments should optimally provide assistance and social protection to help the most vulnerable in society meet their basic needs. In my work, I focus on how psychological factors, including mental health and behavioural biases, affect how people interact with the policy environment and how we evaluate the welfare effects of public programs.
Curriculum Vitae (Updated Jan 2024)
Research
Mental Health and the Targeting of Social Assistance
Abstract (click to expand): Is social assistance well-targeted to people with poor mental health? Mental illness is disproportionately prevalent among the poor, implying a need for access to income-support schemes. However, psychological evidence suggests administrative burdens have higher incidence on people with poor mental health. This generates concern about whether ordeals are screening the mentally-ill efficiently. This question is important because up to now, the welfare consequences of such an inefficiency have remained undocumented. I find that people with moderately poor mental health receive social assistance more than the healthy, however no evidence that the seriously-ill receive more than moderates. My theoretical framework suggests this is driven by need vs ordeal-incidence. I characterize the normative consequences of selection by deriving sufficient-statistics formulas for marginal welfare effects of policies affecting targeting. I exploit an important benefits-reform and find that increased ordeals disproportionately screen out the mentally-ill. This suggests social assistance is currently sub-optimally targeted.
A Welfare Analysis of Public Housing Allocation Mechanisms
(with Neil Thakral)
Abstract (click to expand): When allocating scarce resources such as public housing units to applicants in a waiting list, welfare depends on applicants’ preferences (match values and waiting costs) as well as their choices (which may involve errors). To trade off between allowing agents to wait for better matches and prioritizing agents with high waiting costs, allocation mechanisms impose restrictions on choices. Public housing allocation mechanisms in the UK restrict the set of available options that an applicant may accept, while mechanisms in the US restrict the number of times an applicant may reject. We examine how these different ways of restricting choices influence welfare, both theoretically and empirically. Using data on preferences for public housing in the US and the UK, we show how welfare compares under rationality and explore the sensitivity of the mechanisms to choice-error.
The Social Determinants of Mental Health
(with Jon Kolstad, Will Parker & Johannes Spinnewijn)
Intrapersonal Comparisons as Interpersonal Comparisons
(with Daniel Reck)
