# Krishna Sharma: Curriculum Vitae

Research Fellow / Economist, Hoover Institution, Stanford University · Stanford, California
Email: ksharma3@stanford.edu · Website: https://krishna-sharma.com · PDF: https://krishna-sharma.com/assets/krishna-sharma-cv.pdf
Updated: October 2026

## 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

## Current appointments

- **Research Fellow / Economist, Hoover Institution, Stanford University** (Jan 2025 – present). State and Local Governance Initiative. Builds global talent-flow data from Revelio Labs workforce records (worker-level career histories across countries) to study skilled migration, return, and entrepreneurship; also works on university intellectual property, technology transfer, and public pension policy. Supervisor: Prof. Joshua D. Rauh.
- **Causal Researcher, Pascal Geldsetzer Lab, Stanford School of Medicine** (Jan 2026 – present). Quasi-experimental evaluation of population-health interventions with large-scale electronic health records, including the effect of shingles vaccination on dementia risk.

## Education

- Ph.D., Economics, Clemson University, May 2025
- M.Sc., Economic Analytics, Clemson University, Aug 2024
- M.Phil., Economics, South Asian University, New Delhi, June 2017
- B.A., Economics, Sociology, and Political Science, St. Joseph's College, Bangalore University, May 2013

## Research papers

- **Mama, I'm Coming Home: Brain Gain through Brain Circulation in India.** Working paper (job market paper). Builds a new dataset linking web-scraped startup profiles, founder career histories, and Indian patent records for 7,468 startups. Returnee-led startups file about 18% more patents. IV estimates exploiting changes in U.S. immigration policy imply an elasticity of substitution between returnee and non-returnee founders of 1.41.
- **The US–India Talent Corridor: Who Comes, Who Stays, Who Returns, and What They Build.** Research paper. Uses Revelio Labs career histories for 1,989,507 Indian professionals who moved to the United States, followed year by year in both countries. The corridor runs mostly one way: 72.5% remain in the U.S. at the end of the data and 18.7% return to India within ten years. America's share of Indians' first jobs abroad fell from 48% (pre-2000 cohorts) to 27% (2020–24), while Canada's rose from 5% to 14%.
- **Communication as Governance: Measuring Communicative Stance in University Intellectual Property Policies.** Working paper. Assembles a historical corpus of 518 IP policy documents from 150 U.S. research universities (1944–2025) and builds a human-anchored Policy Communication Stance Index from 87,159 sentences using NLP stance classification. Documents large heterogeneity in how universities communicate authority, compliance, and support to inventors, by institution type, region, and time.
- **Rewriting the Rules: Policy Communication and University Licensing.** Working paper, 2026. Links the policy corpus to AUTM data (1991–2023) and studies technology-transfer outcomes around policy revisions. Across 83 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).
- **AI-Assisted Economic Measurement from Surveys: Evidence from Public Employee Pension Choice.** With Tiancheng Wang. Under review, Public Opinion Quarterly. Develops an iterative LLM-based framework for recovering latent measurement structure from survey instruments. Applied to a large public-employee retirement survey, it separates belief-based from constraint-based drivers of pension choice and provides a portable measurement audit for survey design.
- **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:2602.00138 (https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.00138). Documents a large and persistent reallocation of initial coin offerings toward Europe after the SEC's July 2017 DAO Report (about 14 additional ICOs per region-month), consistent with regulatory spillovers in highly mobile digital-asset markets.
- **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. Working paper. Original survey of 343 professionals across eight sectors in Nepal. Risk perception is positively associated with trust in AI, and accountability expectations act as a baseline condition for adoption rather than a substitute for trust.

## 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.
- "Rental Markets and the Mechanization of Smallholder Agriculture: Evidence from Nepal's Terai." Applied Economics Letters, 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.

## Research in progress

- **Time to Major Decision in Federal Innovation Programs: Evidence from SBIR and STTR.** Administrative data on about 57,000 awards (2015–2024); decision times vary widely across agencies and scale with award size.
- **Capital Continuation in the Full Spectrum of Private Markets** (with P. Basnet). SEC Form D filings for about 49,000 startups (2021–2025); public narrative attention improves prediction of follow-on fundraising.
- **How Founders Explain Their Decisions: A Multimodal Study of Entrepreneur Interviews.** Combines transcripts, speech features, and observable facial expressions from public founder interviews to measure how entrepreneurs describe motivations, choices, and uncertainty; design stage, with validation against human coding.
- **Global Talent Flows.** Building a worldwide, worker-level panel of skilled migration, return, and onward moves from Revelio Labs workforce data, to measure bilateral talent flows across countries, occupations, and firms.

## Policy publications

- 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.

## Teaching experience

- **Instructor of Record, Clemson University** (2022 – 2024)
  - Money and Banking (ECON 3020): Summer 2023 (online), Fall 2023, Spring 2024, Summer 2024 (online); overall 4.7/5 in each evaluated term
  - Principles of Macroeconomics (ECON 2120): Fall 2022; Spring 2023, 125 students (overall 4.5/5)
- **Teaching Assistant, Clemson University** (2020 – 2022): Econometrics (Fall 2021, Spring 2022); Principles of Microeconomics (Fall 2020, Spring 2021); Economics and Law (Fall 2020)
- **Lecturer, National College, Kathmandu University, Nepal** (2018): Intermediate Microeconomics (Spring 2018; overall 4.9/5, 100% response); Intermediate Macroeconomics (Fall 2018; Best Lecturer award)

Teaching evaluations (official Clemson surveys; mean on a 5-point scale):

| Course (responses) | Item | Mine | Dept. |
|---|---|---|---|
| Principles of Macro, Sp 2023 (104/125) | Positive instructor–student interaction | 4.71 | 4.16 |
| Principles of Macro, Sp 2023 (104/125) | Feedback gave me the opportunity to improve | 4.46 | 3.83 |
| Money and Banking, Fa 2023 (39/39) | I understood what was expected of me | 4.77 | 4.34 |
| Money and Banking, Fa 2023 (39/39) | Instructor encouraged questioning and discussion | 4.69 | 4.35 |

Above the department mean on every core teaching item in both courses. Teaching portfolio (teaching statement and complete official evaluations with all student comments): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1IqHmcxaDx8YDeG2kA5Kq7NTAkxWgGw6R

## Grants, fellowships, and awards

- King Center on Global Development Grant, Stanford University (2025)
- Tollison Fellowship, Clemson University (2025)
- Student-Nominated Teaching Assistant of the Semester, Clemson Undergraduate Student Senate (Fall 2021)
- Best Lecturer Award, National College, Kathmandu University (2018)
- SAARC India Silver Jubilee Scholarship, South Asian University (2015)

## Presentations

- 2026: World Bank Land and Property Conference, Washington, DC
- 2025: University of Arizona, College of Social and Behavioral Sciences (invited); Technology Transfer Society Annual Conference, Arizona State University; Oxford Martin School AI Governance Workshop, University of Oxford (invited); Kathmandu University (invited); Tribhuvan University (invited)
- 2024: Southern Economic Association, Washington, DC; ZEW Conference on Innovation and Patenting, Mannheim (also discussant); World Bank; Eastern Economic Association
- 2021: Western Economic Association International (discussant)
- 2019: Western Economic Association International, Tokyo

## Professional service and leadership

- Referee: Digital Finance; PLOS ONE; ICLR 2026 Workshops; 12th International Conference on Computational Social Science.
- Program leadership: Founding coordinator, Nepal Study Program, Center for South Asia, Stanford University; organized lectures in its interdisciplinary series.
- Expert and advisory roles: OECD Expert Group on AI Augmentation and the Future of Work; Advisor, National Examination Board, Nepal (2025); Policy Fellow, Institute of Foreign Affairs, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Nepal.
- Affiliations: Stanford Center for South Asia (2025); Stanford NLP Group (2025); Reshaping Work Initiative, Amsterdam (2025); AI & Society Lab, NAAMII, Nepal (2026).

## Other research experience

- Research Intern, United Nations, New York (Sept 2024). Contributed to the World Social Development Report 2026.
- Research Consultant, National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, New Delhi (2017 – 2018). Evaluation of India's rural housing program (PMAY-G).

## Mentoring

Undergraduate mentees and current placements: Astha Dahal (M.Sc., London School of Economics, 2025); Nirmal Khatri (Erasmus Mundus Fellow, M.Sc. Health and Displacement, 2025); Ritika Sharma (M.A. Economics, Central Michigan University, 2024); Shreya Khatiwada (M.A. Economics, Old Dominion University, 2024). Mentor, Daayitwa Policy Fellowship, Nepal.

## Selected public writing

- "Is AI Pulling Up the Career Ladder? What Recent Evidence Says About Young Workers," Reshaping Work Insights (published on LinkedIn), Oct 2026
- "The Act of Voting Carefully," The Kathmandu Post, Feb 2026
- "Political Reform as Economic Strategy," The Kathmandu Post, Oct 2025
- "A University Free from Party Politics," Kantipur Daily, Oct 2025 (in Nepali)
- "Dynamic Support Prices for Farmers," Kantipur Daily, Mar 2025 (in Nepali)
- "Making AI Policy Truly Effective," The Himalayan Times, Feb 2025
- "The Energy Needs of the AI Revolution" and "How to Mitigate the Risks of AI," Nagarik News (in Nepali)

## Skills and training

- Methods: causal inference (DiD, RD, IV), survey design, index construction, structural estimation (MSM), agent-based modeling, NLP and LLM-based measurement.
- Data: Revelio Labs workforce and career-history data; patent, startup, and SEC Form D records; AUTM; electronic health records.
- Programming: Python (pandas, PyTorch, OpenAI/Anthropic APIs), Stata, LaTeX.
- Training: Applied ML with Python and Agentic AI in Action, Stanford (2026); U.S. Intellectual Property Law and Summer School, Stanford Law School (2025).
- Languages: English, Nepali.