Maitreesh Ghatak is Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics. He is an elected Fellow of the Econometric Society, the British Academy, and a Fellow of the International Economic Association.  He has previously taught at the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago.  His main areas of research interest are development economics, public economics, and the economics of organizations. He is the Director of the Development Economics Group at the research Centre STICERD, LSE and is the PhD Programme Director at the Department of Economics, LSE. He did his PhD in Economics at Harvard University in 1996 under the supervision of Eric Maskin and Abhijit V. Banerjee. Earlier, he did his undergraduate degree in Economics at Presidency College, Calcutta and his Master’s in Economics at the Delhi School of Economics. He is presently a co-editor of Economica , having previously served as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Development Economics, the Managing Editor of the Review of Economic Studies, and a co-editor of The Economics of Transition. He is also in the editorial board of several journals, as well as a co-editor of the blog Ideas for India. He is a Board Member of the Bureau for Research in the Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD); Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR); a Research Fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS). He is currently a member of the US Government’s Millennium Challenge Corporation Economic Advisory Council and has served in the past as the Lead Academic of the International Growth Centre’s (IGC) India–Bihar programme and as an external member of the Research Committee of The World Bank. He is a founding member of the research network Theoretical Research in Development (ThReD).  He writes regularly on economic, political and policy issues for a broader audience with a special focus on India in various newspapers, magazines, and blogs.