education & work interests
Abhishek completed the requirements for the PhD program in Economics, Management, and Data Science (EMDS) in November 2020. This program has been recently renamed to Economics, Networks and Business Analytics (ENBA). He was affiliated with the AXES research unit where he investigated collective behaviour in large scale digital platforms like educational communities, social media, and news media. He was advised by Professor Massimo Riccaboni and Professor Paolo Pin. His thesis has been reviewed by Professor Arun Chandrasekhar and Professor Giorgio Fagiolo, and his defense committee included Professor Nicola Dimitri, Professor Giorgio Fagiolo, and Professor Tiziano Squartini.
Abhishek has published in international journals like Online Social Networks and Media and Palgrave Communications (Nature Research), and in conference proceedings like Complex Networks. He has presented his research proceedings in several conferences including International Conference in Computational Social Science, European Conference in Social Networks, and others. He has held visiting period at Bocconi University and done internship at Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. He has attended several workshops, including those at Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, and Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna. His research interests include investigation of human behaviour in social, business, and economic contexts. He has experience in working on several methods including social networks, text analysis, time series, statistics, and machine learning. During recent years, he has been particularly interested in network analysis, impact evaluation in observational settings, big data analysis, and causal mediation. You can find more about his research here.
Prior to his doctoral studies, Abhishek has completed master programs in Economics during 2014-16 at Toulouse School of Economics, France and an integrated master program in Science with specialization in Mathematics during 2009-14 at National Institute of Science Education and Research, India. During these years, he investigated topics related to macro-finance and corporate finance, especially around systemic crises in banking sector, and currency crises. He developed experience in several methods including financial econometrics, stochastic calculus, and game theory.
Abhishek's master and doctoral studies have been funded by INSPIRE Scholarship (2009-14, Government of India), TSE Master Scholarship (2015-16), IMT PhD Grant (2016-19), Frontier Fellowship Program (2019-20, IMT School), and several travel and research grants by the AXES Research Unit at IMT School (2016-19).
Abhishek has been inspired by the humility of Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam and Professor Jean Tirole, and by the works of Professor Raghuram Rajan in banking and finance, and Professor Matthew O. Jackson in social networks.
