Vijayendra Rao is a Lead Economist in the Development Research Group at the World Bank. In 2026, he will transition to become an independent scholar, and will serve as the Roberta Buffett Distinguished Scholar-Practitioner in Residence at Northwestern University from March to June 2026.

Dr. Rao works at the intersection of scholarship and practice. He integrates his training in economics with theories and methods from anthropology, sociology, and political science to study how social and political contexts shape the lives of people living in poverty.

His early research pioneered new approaches to the economics of dowries, domestic violence, and sex work. His 2004 edited volume with Michael Walton, Culture and Public Action, helped spark interdisciplinary conversations about aspirations, inequality traps, and cultural heritage. He has a long-standing interest in political economy and democratic decentralization in India, and is a strong advocate of combining qualitative and quantitative methods to make economics more reflexive and grounded in lived experience.

Recently, Dr. Rao has been experimenting with AI and natural language processing to analyze large-scale, open-ended qualitative interviews. He has applied these techniques to study aspirations for children and to understand and measure well-being through narrative data. He is the co-author, with Ghazala Mansuri, of Localizing Development: Does Participation Work? and, with Paromita Sanyal, of Oral Democracy: Deliberation in Indian Village Assemblies.

From 2010 to 2020 he led the World Bank’s Social Observatory, an initiative designed to enhance the adaptive capacity of large-scale anti-poverty programs by embedding researchers within implementation teams and tailoring interdisciplinary research to operational needs.

Dr. Rao holds a BA in Economics from St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai, and a PhD in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania. Before joining the World Bank’s research department in 1999, he held academic appointments at the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, Williams College, and Brown University. He is a Fellow of the International Economics Association, Chair of the Advisory Committee of the Boundaries, Membership and Belonging Program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and a Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for Global Development.