About

Namrata Kala is the Digital Equipment Corp. Associate Professor of Management and an Associate Professor in Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. She is an economist with research interests in environmental and development economics. Her current research projects include studying how firms and households learn about and adapt to environmental change and regulation, the returns to environmental technologies, and the returns to worker training and incentives. She has a background that includes being a Prize Fellow in Economics, History, and Politics at Harvard University and a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT. She earned her PhD in environmental economics from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, along with a BA (Honors) in economics from Delhi University and an MA in international and development economics from Yale University.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Economics
• Medicine
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• World Wide Web
• Library science
• Socioeconomics
• Economic growth
• Management
• Public relations
• Demography
• Environmental health
• Medical education
• Psychology
• Law

Selected publications

• Seeing Green: The Effects of Financial Exposures on Support for Climate Action

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Seeing Green: The Effects of Financial Exposures on Support for Climate Action

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• The Impact of Financial Support to SMEs to Improve Energy Efficiency: A Pan-European RCT

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2025-01-09

  dataset
  PublisherDOI

• Firm Presence, Pollution, and Agglomeration: Evidence from a Randomized Environmental Place-Based Policy

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The Power of Persuasion: Causal Effects of Household Communication on Women's Employment

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Impact of Financial Support to SMEs to Improve Energy Efficiency: A Pan-European RCT

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2025-01-09

  dataset
  PublisherDOI

• Money (Not) to Burn: Payments for Ecosystem Services to Reduce Crop Residue Burning

  American Economic Review Insights · 2025-02-27 · 13 citations

  article

  We test whether payments for ecosystem services (PES) can curb the highly polluting practice of crop residue burning in India. Standard PES contracts pay participants after verification that they met a proenvironment condition (clearing fields without burning). We randomize paying a portion of the money up front and unconditionally to address liquidity constraints and farmer distrust, which may undermine the standard contract’s effectiveness. Incorporating partial up-front payment into the contract increases compliance by 10 percentage points, which is corroborated by satellite-based burning measurements. The cost per life saved is $3,600–$5,400. The standard PES contract has no effect on burning. (JEL D86, O13, Q12, Q15, Q18, Q53, Q58)

  PublisherDOI

• Firm Presence, Pollution, and Agglomeration: Evidence from a Randomized Environmental Place-Based Policy

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-04-01

  reportOpen accessSenior author

  Firm location decisions are a key managerial choice, usually optimized over factors like proximity to customers or suppliers.These decisions may also impose externalities on the environment, and on other firms due to competitive or agglomerative forces.The inherent endogeneity of location decisions makes estimating the impact of firm presence difficult.In this paper, we study an environmental place-based policy that randomly moved over 20,000 small firms in New Delhi to industrial areas outside the city over several years.We find that a reduction in firm presence improves air quality, reducing industrial pollution by 8% for the average neighborhood.However, industrial relocation is costly for firms, significantly increasing the probability of firm exit.We combine the exogenous assignment of firms to industrial plots with a model of firms playing a game of incomplete information to estimate the effect of neighborhood composition on firm survival through Marshallian agglomeration forces.We find that proximity to neighboring firms with inputoutput linkages increases the likelihood of firm survival, and taking these into account while determining firm placement in industrial areas would have halved the costs imposed on firms by the policy.These results provide causal evidence on the trade-offs between firm presence and environmental quality, and show that firm spillovers can be a useful force to minimize the costs on regulated firms.

  PublisherDOI

• The Impacts of Employee Excellence Rewards on Workers and Firms: The Role of Managerial Discretion vs. Worker Empowerment

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2024-11-21

  dataset1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Impacts of Managerial Autonomy on Firm Outcomes

  Econometrica · 2024-01-01 · 12 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  The allocation of decision‐making power is a critical choice that organizations make to mitigate agency problems and information frictions. This paper investigates the role of delegation for organizations where the agency problem is both pervasive and has potentially high welfare consequences: state‐owned enterprises (SOEs). I use a natural experiment in India to uncover the causal effects of granting SOE managers more autonomy over strategic decisions. Managers meaningfully exercise this autonomy, which results in greater value added, but also a reduced emphasis on outcomes valued by the government, such as a reduction in worker amenities (employee housing), and an increase in markups. Returns to autonomy are higher for firms with higher baseline incentive conflict.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Achyuta Adhvaryu

  Universidad Católica Santo Domingo

  53 shared

• Anant Nyshadham

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  51 shared

• James Fenske

  22 shared

• Seema Jayachandran

  Princeton University

  8 shared

• Rohini Pande

  Yale University

  8 shared

• Kelsey Jack

  7 shared

• Caitlin Rowe

  3 shared

• Chagai Weiss

  Stanford University

  2 shared

Awards & honors

• Prize Fellow in Economics, History, and Politics at Harvard…