Krishna Sharma
Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University
Ph.D. in Economics, Clemson University (2025)
Why do some ideas become innovations, while others never get the chance?
I’m an economist interested in the people and institutions behind technological change. My research explores how talent moves across borders, how entrepreneurs turn ideas into businesses, and how policies shape innovation and economic opportunity. I combine applied econometrics, large-scale data, and AI-based measurement to study these questions.
I enjoy working with people from different disciplines, especially when different perspectives help us ask better questions. I'm always open to new ideas, research collaborations, and interesting conversations. Please feel free to reach out.
Research
Mama, I'm Coming Home: Visa Uncertainty and the Founders America Loses
I build new linked data from Revelio Labs career histories that follow 1.55 million U.S. graduate-degree holders across countries and into 263,009 startups founded in India and the United States. Graduating classes that faced worse H-1B odds left the United States at higher rates, and STEM graduates left in the year their work permission ended. Startups built in India by returnees are larger, hire more, survive more often, and grow as fast as those of comparable founders who stayed. Returnees are not selected on ability; much of their advantage in scale comes from the place.
Communication as Governance: Measuring Communicative Stance in University Intellectual Property Policies
A historical corpus of 518 intellectual-property policies from 150 U.S. research universities (1944–2025) and a human-anchored Policy Communication Stance Index built from 87,159 sentences. Universities differ widely in how they communicate authority, compliance, and support to inventors, by institution type, region, and time.
From Policy Communication to Technology Transfer: Evidence from University IP-Policy Revisions
Linking the policy corpus to AUTM data (1991–2023), we study licensing around 83 policy revisions. Licensing rises 0.170 log points relative to comparison institutions after inventor-supportive revisions and falls 0.133 after restrictive ones (difference 0.303; permutation p = 0.011).
The Geography of Initial Coin Offerings Around the 2017 U.S. Securities-Law Transition
A persistent shift in initial coin offerings toward Europe after the SEC's 2017 DAO Report, showing how regulation spills across borders in mobile digital-asset markets.
AI-Assisted Economic Measurement from Surveys: Evidence from Public Employee Pension Choice
An iterative language-model framework that recovers the measurement structure of survey instruments. Applied to a large public-employee retirement survey, it separates belief-based from constraint-based drivers of pension choice.
The Role of Formal Vocational Training in Female Labor Force Participation: Evidence from Nepal
Work in progress
- The US–India Talent Corridor: Who Comes, Who Stays, Who Returns, and What They Build. Career histories for 1,989,507 Indian professionals who moved to the United States: 72.5 percent remain in the U.S. and 18.7 percent return within ten years.
- The Distributional and Fiscal Effects of Defined Benefit Pension Reform (with J. D. Rauh and S. Gundapaneni). A structural lifecycle model of worker retention, retirement incentives, fiscal costs, and welfare.
- Time to Major Decision in Federal Innovation Programs: evidence from about 57,000 SBIR and STTR awards.
- Capital Continuation in the Full Spectrum of Private Markets (with P. Basnet).
- How Founders Explain Their Decisions: a multimodal study of entrepreneur interviews (with N. Regmi).
Publications
- Does Conflict Reshape the Military–FDI Nexus? Evidence from a Dynamic Panel Analysis (with P. Bhandari and N. Regmi). Review of International Economics, 2026.
- Social Media Discussion and Short-Horizon Stock Returns: Evidence from a Retail Coordination Episode (with P. Basnet and K. R. Bhatt). Digital Finance, 8(1), 18, 2026.
- Mechanization and Downside Income Risk: Evidence from Three Terai Districts in Nepal. Agricultural & Environmental Letters, 11(2), e70087, 2026.
Policy reports
- AI Benefit-Sharing Framework: Balancing Access and Safety (contributing author). Oxford Martin AI Governance Initiative, University of Oxford, 2025.
- Impact of Pradhan Mantri Awaas Yojana–Gramin (PMAY-G). National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, New Delhi, 2018.
- Artificial Intelligence, Trust, and Accountability in a Low-Capacity State (contributing author) · In progress.
Teaching
I have taught Money and Banking and Principles of Macroeconomics as instructor of record at Clemson University, and Intermediate Microeconomics and Macroeconomics at Kathmandu University. My teaching rests on three ideas: mutual learning, practical relevance, and learning from mistakes.
शिक्षामूलं धर्मः — Education is the foundation of righteousness.
- Money and Banking (Clemson, 2023–2024): overall evaluation 4.7 / 5
- Principles of Macroeconomics (Clemson, Spring 2023, 125 students): overall evaluation 4.5 / 5
- Student-Nominated Teaching Assistant of the Semester, Clemson Undergraduate Student Senate, Fall 2021
- Best Lecturer Award, National College, Kathmandu University, 2018
"Professor Krishna encouraged us to join the class discussion even if we weren't sure if we were right."
Teaching evaluations and award
Selected Public Writing
- “Is AI Pulling Up the Career Ladder? What Recent Evidence Says About Young Workers,” Reshaping Work Insights (published on LinkedIn), October 7, 2026. A review of recent research on AI and entry-level hiring, and what it means for policy. Read more · Reshaping Work post
- “The Act of Voting Carefully,” The Kathmandu Post, February 16, 2026. Read more
- “Political Reform as Economic Strategy,” The Kathmandu Post, October 9, 2025. Read more
- “Making AI Policy Truly Effective,” The Himalayan Times, February 21, 2025. Read more
- In Nepali: “A University Free from Party Politics,” Kantipur Daily, October 2025; “Dynamic Support Prices for Farmers,” Kantipur Daily, March 2025; “The Energy Needs of the AI Revolution” and “How to Mitigate the Risks of AI,” Nagarik News.
Human + AI Innovation
Human + AI: Can You Make a Breakthrough?
How should people and AI work together to innovate? In this two-minute interactive game, you lead a small research team, choose a challenge, and decide when to rely on AI and when human judgment matters most.
Contact
Hoover Institution, Stanford University
ksharma3@stanford.edu