Abilities India
Tier-2 auto supplier. Women in Auto project, Inache deployment, and decarbonization collaboration.
I'm an economist at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, where I study how firms, managers, and workers make decisions — and how those decisions aggregate into the productivity and well-being we see across labor markets in the developing world. My recent work lives at the intersection of personnel economics, organizational behavior, and AI in hiring. I co-founded Good Business Lab to translate this research into practice.

My research asks what happens inside firms — not as a black box, but as a setting where contracts, training, management, and voice shape the lives of hundreds of millions of workers. I run long-running field experiments with large employers in Mexico, Kenya, Tanzania, India, Colombia, Argentina, and the United States, and combine them with administrative and algorithmic data to identify what actually moves productivity, retention, and welfare.
I'm particularly interested in how AI-based screening and training tools are reshaping the match between workers and firms, and in the conditions under which those tools serve workers rather than replacing judgment we should protect. My earlier work — still ongoing — traces how early-life shocks, health, and sectoral choice compound across the life cycle in low- and middle-income economies.
When I'm not on a factory floor, a coffee farm, or in a classroom, I'm probably in the studio. I've been writing, arranging, and recording music for twenty-five years.
Every field experiment in the papers below runs inside a real firm. These are our active partners — companies, industry associations, multilaterals, and sustainability orgs — whose operations host the research, adopt the tools we build (STITCH · Inache · CAF), and whose data makes causal inference possible. Work spans USA, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, China, India, and Thailand. Filter by industry, region, or practice area.
Tier-2 auto supplier. Women in Auto project, Inache deployment, and decarbonization collaboration.
Automotive Component Manufacturers Association of India. Founding partner for the Women in the Auto Sector project.
Host plant for field studies on product cycles, frontline worker wellbeing, and line-level productivity during new-model introductions.
Integrated textile and apparel group. Long-running partner on performance monitoring, line matching, and worker-voice research; Inache deployment.
Women in Auto rapid diagnosis across multiple themes; active on decarbonization work.
Train-the-Trainer manager module from the Women in Auto project scaled to 1,000+ managers.
Operator of Nike stores in India. Research on employee experience and attrition; STITCH training for Mumbai stores; data partnership under discussion.
Major Colombian bank. Research on technology adaptation and reorganizing work, funded via Harvard.
Engagement with DLF Foundation and Group construction business; field visits to DLF sites planned.
Textile exporter and active partner on the Decarbonization in Automotive & Textiles project; proposal development on health, grievance, and gender.
Colombia's largest retailer. Harvard Business School-funded research on algorithmic screening, psychometric contracts, and frontline manager selection.
Apex cross-sector industry association. Leadership-level engagement on DEI, women empowerment, sustainability; co-hosted national events.
MoU-based joint proposal on workforce resilience in the critical minerals transition.
Diagnostics exercise on women's participation in the real estate industry.
European brand and textile distributor. Implementation of GBL's STITCH soft-skills training inside their supplier network.
D2C social sustainability brand and implementation partner on the Women's Livelihoods at Scale (WLS) project.
Garment manufacturer. Partner in the Inache rollout — the worker-voice platform now deployed across 68 factories.
Active partnership under MoU across workstreams of the Women in the Auto Sector project.
South Asian apparel manufacturer. UNFPA case study on women's health and nutrition programs; expansion into India underway.
Department of Economic Affairs, Govt of India. GBL research referenced in India's Economic Survey 2025–26.
Tier-1 apparel manufacturer. Implementation of Inache, GBL's worker-voice and grievance-resolution platform.
Major Indonesian garment manufacturer supplying Lululemon. UNFPA case study on implementation of sexual-and-reproductive-health programming inside factories.
Retailers Association of India. DEI roadmap and workforce-transformation partnership; engagements with Reliance Retail and Titan.
Reimagining Industry to Support Equality. Network-wide STITCH scale-up and joint proposal development on horizontal advancement for women.
Over 100,000 workers employed in Vietnam. UNFPA / MSI collaboration on sexual-and-reproductive-health programming inside factories.
Women in Auto project — diagnosis, solutioning, and recruitment pilot on the shop floor.
Colombian insurance firm. Research on soft-skills training in the introduction of a new product.
South Asia's largest garment exporter. GBL was incubated here in 2013 evaluating Gap Inc.'s P.A.C.E. program. Continuing site for RCTs on soft-skills training, supervision, worker voice, and decarbonization.
Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (OEMs). Founding partner for the Women in the Auto Sector project.
Social & Labor Convergence Program. MoU on data partnership and possible Inache-CAF integration.
Women in Auto project — diagnosis and solution design.
Women in Auto project — pilot on recruitment and placement of women on the shop floor.
Textile mill. Inache implementation partner.
Women in Auto project — diagnosis and solution design.
Women in Auto project — diagnosis, solutioning, and field pilots.
Ecosystem partner focused on women's workforce participation.
Partnership across India, Vietnam, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and USA offices on sexual-reproductive-health and mental-health projects.
Good Business Forum collaborator; member of heat-stress consortium with ClimateWorks grant support.
Garment manufacturer. Inache implementation partner.
A non-profit I co-founded to turn rigorous labor-economics research into tools, training, and policy that firms will actually adopt — and that measurably improve worker welfare.
I have been active in music production for over twenty years. jugalBand is a collaboration with Ach Adhvaryu.
Stream jugalBand on Spotify, Apple Music, and Tidal.