Welcome! I'm Maiwand Nangyal, a DPhil Candidate in Economics at the University of Oxford, generously funded by the ESRC, grateful to be studying at the joint-best university in the world (tied with Cambridge in my opinion 😊).

My PhD research investigates how colonial institutions shaped long-run development in South Asia, combining Development Economics, Economic History and Political Economy with modern Econometrics and Machine Learning. My current work traces the lasting economic legacy of British administrative policy in western British India - exploiting heterogeneous inter-regional variation in colonial governance to identify divergent long-run development outcomes - with direct implications for how we think about state capacity, institutional design, and development policy today.

I'm supervised by Professor Stephen Broadberry and Dr Eric Chaney, and am a proud member of Wolfson College. Alongside my doctoral research, I serve as Director of Research at Data for Afghanistan, a platform producing high-quality data and visualisations for empirical research on Afghanistan (one of the world's most data-scarce, conflict-affected countries). Alongside this, I have a growing research interest in impact evaluation/measurement, informed by my work with the Outcomes Measurement Unit at the World Bank Group on sustainable development financing.

Views expressed here are solely my own and do not represent any institution I'm currently affiliated with or have been affiliated with in the past.