I'm Vaasavi, a PhD Candidate at Ohio State University.

My research asks how the institutions that shape economic life (such as voting behavior, belief formation, political regimes) arise endogenously from the same market mechanisms they are built to constrain. Rather than treating institutions as exogenous shocks or focusing only on their downstream effects, I build structural models that trace their formation and persistence directly from micro-level incentives.

One line of work embeds endogenous regime switching between populist and liberal political equilibria in a heterogeneous-agent macro model, where voters choose migration and tax policy under aggregate uncertainty and political survival depends on the wealth distribution that redistribution itself produces. A second develops a Bayesian learning framework in which small firms form beliefs about macro persistence and volatility from biased information environments, showing how media bias and recession-driven selection on firm types can generate slow recoveries without any change in fundamentals.

Across both projects, the throughline is the same: institutions and market outcomes co-evolve, and modeling that co-evolution requires taking belief formation and political constraints as objects of economic choice rather than as background. On more casual days, I describe the agenda as a Marx-Hayek meet-cute.

I will be going on the market in the 2027-2028 academic year.