Krishna Sharma

Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University
Ph.D. in Economics, Clemson University (2025)

I study how institutions shape innovation and the movement of skilled people and ideas. My work covers skilled migration and return, university intellectual-property policy, public innovation programs, and the use of AI for economic measurement.

CV Research statement Teaching portfolio

Fields of interest
Primary: Economics of Innovation and Entrepreneurship; Development Economics; Migration
Secondary: Applied Econometrics and Causal Inference; AI and Machine Learning for Economic Measurement

Research

Mama, I'm Coming Home: Brain Gain through Brain Circulation in India

Job market paper

I link startup profiles, founder career histories, and Indian patent records for 7,468 startups. Startups led by returnees file about 18 percent more patents. Using changes in U.S. immigration policy as an instrument, I estimate an elasticity of substitution of 1.41 between returnee and non-returnee founders.

Request manuscript

The US–India Talent Corridor: Who Comes, Who Stays, Who Returns, and What They Build

Research paper

Using Revelio Labs career histories for 1,989,507 Indian professionals who moved to the United States, I find that 72.5 percent are still in the U.S. at the end of the data and 18.7 percent return within ten years. The U.S. share of Indians' first jobs abroad fell from 48 percent for pre-2000 cohorts to 27 percent for 2020–24.

Communication as Governance and Rewriting the Rules

Working papers

A corpus of 518 intellectual-property policies from 150 U.S. research universities (1944–2025) and a stance index built from 87,159 sentences. Across 83 policy revisions, licensing rose by 0.170 log points relative to comparison institutions when policies became more favorable to inventors and fell by 0.133 when they became more restrictive.

AI-Assisted Economic Measurement from Surveys

With Tiancheng Wang · Under review, Public Opinion Quarterly

An iterative language-model procedure that recovers the structure of survey instruments, applied to public employees' pension choices.

Regulatory Migration to Europe: ICO Reallocation Following U.S. Securities Enforcement

With K. R. Bhatt and I. Giri · Revise and resubmit, Journal of Regulatory Economics

arXiv preprint

Other working papers

• The Role of Formal Vocational Training in Female Labor Force Participation: Evidence from Nepal (with P. Dhungana). Revise and resubmit, Journal of Development Perspectives.
• Artificial Intelligence, Trust, and Accountability in a Low-Capacity State (with I. Giri and R. N. Shrestha).

Work in progress

• Global talent flows: a worldwide panel of skilled migration, return, and onward moves from Revelio Labs data.
• How Founders Explain Their Decisions: a multimodal study of entrepreneur interviews (transcripts, speech, and facial expressions).
• 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).

Publications

1. Does Conflict Reshape the Military–FDI Nexus? Evidence from a Dynamic Panel Analysis (with P. Bhandari and N. Regmi). Review of International Economics, 2026.
2. Rental Markets and the Mechanization of Smallholder Agriculture: Evidence from Nepal's Terai. Applied Economics Letters, 2026.
3. 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.
4. 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 (Oxford Martin AI Governance Initiative, 2025, contributing author); Impact of Pradhan Mantri Awaas Yojana–Gramin (NIPFP, 2018).

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 statement, 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.

Play the Innovation Game

An educational simulation with illustrative rules, not research findings. It runs in your browser, with no sign-in and no data collection.

Contact

Hoover Institution, Stanford University
ksharma3@stanford.edu

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