Political Economy of Climate Idea Lab

Nikhar Gaikwad is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science and a member of the Committee on Global Thought, Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies, and the South Asia Institute at Columbia University.  Previously, he was a fellow at the Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance at Princeton University.  Prior to his academic positions, he was a senior analyst and research associate at Cornerstone Research, where he conducted economics and finance research in complex regulatory disputes.

Gaikwad received his Ph.D. with departmental and university distinction, M.Phil., and M.A. in political science from Yale University.  He received his B.A. magna cum laude in economics and political science (Honors) from Williams College, where he was a Williams College Undergraduate Research Fellow and studied at the University of Oxford as part of the Williams-Exeter Program at Oxford.

Gaikwad’s research interests span international and comparative political economy, with a focus on the politics of economic policymaking and identity. Substantively, he works on international trade, migration, and climate change. He has a regional specialization in India, which he studies in comparative perspective with other democratic emerging economies.  A main line of inquiry studies how material interests interact with identity-related factors when voters and political elites contest distributive policies in the electoral arena. A related stream of work investigates how structural features of the global economy and geopolitics interface with democratic politics to influence international economic cooperation, representation, and development. His work employs a range of methodological approaches—from quantitative analysis, formal modeling, and experiments to interviews, archival analysis, and qualitative methods. 

Gaikwad’s articles have been published in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Journal of Politics, British Journal of Political Science, Quarterly Journal of Political Science, World Politics, International Organization, and Perspectives on Politics. His co-edited volume, Climate Justice Now! Multidisciplinary Perspectives on the Climate Crisis, is forthcoming at Columbia University Press (2025), and he is working on a book manuscript, Identity Politics and Economic Policy.

Gaikwad has received a number of awards, including the International Political Economy Society’s David A. Lake Award for Best Paper; the American Political Science Association’s Franklin L. Burdette/Pi Sigma Alpha Award for Best Paper, Political Economy Section’s Fiona McGillivray Award for Best Paper and Mancur Olson Prize for Best Dissertation (Honorable Mention), Democracy and Autocracy Section’s Juan Linz Prize for Best Dissertation and Best Paper Award, Comparative Politics Section’s Sage Paper Prize for Best Paper, and Representation and Electoral Systems Section’s Lawrence Longley Award for Best Paper (Honorable Mention); and the Midwest Political Science Association’s Pi Sigma Alpha Award for Best Paper, Kellogg/Notre Dame Award for Best Paper in Comparative Politics, and Robert H. Durr Award for the Best Paper in Applied Quantitative Methods.

His research has been funded by the Social Science Research Council, International Growth Centre, Tobin Project, Institution for Social and Policy Studies, Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, President’s Global Innovation Fund, Evidence in Governance and Politics, and Research and Empirical Analysis of Labor Migration, among other centers. It has been profiled in media outlets around the world, from The New York Times to Le Monde to Hindustan Times. 

Gaikwad is the 2025 recipient of Columbia’s Division of Social Science Award for Excellence and Commitment to Teaching. He has a keen interest in pedagogical innovations in the classroom. With support from Provostial teaching grants at Columbia, he has developed case study-based curricula and published a wide range of instructional case studies to teach students topics in political economy.  

Gaikwad has also led several discipline-wide initiatives, including serving as co-chair of the Historical Political Economy Working Group, Virtual-IPES, and the APSA Qualitative and Multi-Method Section's Working Group on Text-Based Sources. He is on the editorial board of Comparative Political Studies. At Columbia, he has participated in university-wide initiatives, including serving as co-chair of the Climate School’s Decarbonization, Climate Resilience, and Climate Justice network, on the Junior Faculty Advisory Board, and on the Executive Committees of the Committee on Global Thought and Columbia Mumbai Global Center. 

Maria Victoria Murillo (Ph.D., Harvard, 1997) holds a joint appointment with the Department of Political Science and the School of International and Public Affairs.

Murillo is the author of Labor Unions, Partisan Coalitions, and Market Reforms in Latin America, which was translated as Sindicatos, Coaliciones Partidarias y Reformas de Mercado en América Latina by Siglo XXI Editores and Political Competition, Partisanship, and Policymaking in the Reform of Latin American Public Utilities. She is also the co-author of Non-Policy Politics: Richer Voters, Poorer Voters, and the Diversification of Electoral Strategies with Ernesto Calvo (Cambridge University Press 2019) and Understanding Institutional Weakness: Power and Design in Latin American Institutions (Cambridge University Press, Element in Latin American Politics and Society Series, 2019) with Daniel Brinks and Steven Levitsky. She is also the co-editor of Understanding Weak Institutions: Lessons from Latin America ( Cambridge University Press, forthcoming 2020), Argentine Democracy: The Politics of Institutional Weakness (Penn State University Press 2005), Carreras Magisteriales, Desempeño Educativo y Sindicatos de Maestros en América Latina (Flacso, 2003), and Discutir Alfonsín (Siglo XXI, 2010). Her work has also appeared in International Organization, World Politics, American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Politics, Comparative Political Studies, World Development, the Annual Review of Political Science, and many Latin American academic journals.

Murillo's research on distributive politics in Latin America has covered labor politics and labor regulations, public utility reform, education reform, agricultural policies, and economic policy more generally. Her more recent work focuses on electoral behavior, contentious dynamics, and the analysis of institutional weakness. Her empirical work is based on a variety of methods ranging from quantitative analysis of datasets built for all Latin American countries to qualitative field work in Argentina, Chile, Mexico, and Venezuela and survey and experiments in Argentina and Chile.

Murillo received her B.A. from the Universidad de Buenos Aires and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. Murillo has taught at Yale University, was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University (Harvard Academy for Area Studies & David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies), and at the Russell Sage Foundation, as well as a Fulbright fellow.

Geoffrey Heal, Donald C. Waite III Professor Emeritus of Social Enterprise at Columbia Business School, is noted for contributions to economic theory and resource and environmental economics. He holds bachelors (first class), masters and doctoral degrees from Cambridge University, where he studied at Churchill College and taught at Christ’s College. He has also taught at Sussex, Essex, Yale, Stanford, École Polytechnique, Stockholm and Princeton. He holds an Honorary Doctorate from the Universite´ de Paris Dauphine.

Author of eighteen books and about two hundred articles, Professor Heal is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, past Managing Editor of the Review of Economic Studies, Past President of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, recipient of its prize for publications of enduring quality and a Life Fellow, recipient of the 2013 Best Publication Prize of the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, a Director of the Union of Concerned Scientists and a founder and Director and chairman of the Board of the Coalition for Rainforest Nations, developers of the REDD policy for reducing deforestation by awarding carbon credits for forest conservation. Recent books include Nature and the Marketplace, Valuing the Future, When Principles Pay and Whole Earth Economics (forthcoming).

Professor Heal chaired a committee of the National Academy of Sciences on valuing ecosystem services, was a Commissioner of the Pew Oceans Commission, was a coordinating lead author of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report, was a member of President Sarkozy’s Commission on the Meaurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, was a member of the advisory board for the World Bank’s 2010 World Development Report and the United Nations Environment Program’s 2011 Human Development Report, and acts as an advisor to the World Bank on its Green Growth project. He is also a Director of Public Business, a foundation that promotes in-depth public interest journalism and a member of the Advisory Board of Green Seal.

He has been a principal in two start-up companies, a consulting firm and a software and telecommunications company, and until recently was a member of the Investment Committee of a green private equity group. He teaches MBA courses on “Current Developments in Energy Markets,” “Business and Society: Doing Well by Doing Good?” and “The Business of Sustainability,” teaches a doctoral course on advanced microeconomic theory, and advises doctoral students interested in sustainability.