Rubina Verma
Rubina Verma is an Assistant Professor whose teaching and research fields are Macroeconomics, Economic Growth, International Economics and International Trade.
Previously she was a visiting assistant professor at the University of Southern California (USC) from 2015-2016 and an assistant professor at Instituto Tecnologico de Autonomo (ITAM), Mexico from 2008-2015. Most of her current research focuses on examining productivity - at both the aggregate and micro level - and the association of productivity with trade, trade reform and liberalization. She has a deep interest in understanding the process of economic growth and structural transformation in developing countries. A large part of her dissertation focused on the Indian economy. The main chapter of her dissertation “Can Total Factor Productivity Explain Value Added Growth in Services” was published in the Journal of Development Economics (2012) in which she examined the rapid service sector driven growth in the Indian economy during 1980-2005. Taking this research further, she is currently working to understand another feature of the Indian growth experience - the persistently high degree of informality in Indian manufacturing. Trade Liberalization has also been an area of interest and one of her recent papers, forthcoming in the IMF Economic Review, focuses on the South Korean economy and in particular the structural change and trade reform witnessed by her during 1963-2000. She has also published in The Oxford Handbook of the Indian Economy as well as Palgrave Macmillan’s The Rise of China and India: Impacts, Prospects and Implications, UNU-WIDER Studies in Development Economics and Politics. She was selected as a researcher in the Sistema Nacional de Investigadores (National Researchers System, Mexico) for the 2012-2016 period.
At USC she taught courses such as Principles of Macroeconomics, Intermediate Macroeconomics, as well as a special course on the Chinese economy to undergraduate students. At ITAM, she taught International Business and Business Forecasting to undergraduates and International Trade to graduate students in the MBA program. She has received many teaching awards during her teaching career and thoroughly enjoys teaching, especially economics courses to undergraduate students.