Eshaan Patel

Hello! I am a PhD candidate in Economics at Columbia University and am on the job market this year. My fields are macroeconomics, development, and political economy.

My research centers on firms, misallocation, and aggregate productivity. My job market paper examines how firms respond to imperfectly enforced labor regulations and quantifies the aggregate consequences of those responses. I am also interested in the political economy of the barriers firms face: how lobbying shapes policy and how incumbent firms influence barriers to entry. Methodologically, I work primarily with structural models and also have interest in agent-based and other computational approaches to firm dynamics.

Alongside my research, I work on applied policy design, guided by the question: how can we design policy to address deep inefficiencies while remaining politically feasible?