Structure

Research Advisory Panel (RAP)

M Ali Khan

Khan sees issues in development economics alongside those in methodology and the history of ideas. Interests in population, education and the environment have led him to consider the robustness of disciplinary boundaries, and more broadly, to the relationship between economic development and cultural change. This subsumes the question of how markets handle, or fail to handle, basic issues of resource allocation, one that has led him to the Scottish Enlightenment, and to the "economics of the eighteenth century."
Khan continues to pursue interests in economic interaction, as formalized in general equilibrium theory, and in economic dynamics: models with a representative agent, as well as those with a finite number and a continuum. In collaboration with Professors Kali Rath and Yeneng Sun, he is exploring situations in which an individual agent is "numerically negligible" but is nevertheless influenced by actions, or summary statistics of actions, of all other agents in a game where individual and social outcomes are subject to both systematic and idiosyncratic risk. In collaboration with Professor Tapan Mitra, he is conducting a detailed analysis of a particular, but a particularly intriguing, case of a model due to Robinson, Solow and Srinivasan, the so-called RSS model.
Khan hopes that this work in time and uncertainty will also lead to applications in other applied fields such as cost-benefit analysis for economic development.
Khan’s interests in theory and epistemology are complemented by those in mathematics: methods of nonstandard analysis (Loeb spaces), nonsmooth analysis and optimization (Mordukhovich-Ioffe cones), deterministic dynamical systems and stochastic processes (law of large numbers with a continuum of random variables).


Contact:

John Hopkins
Office: Mergenthaler Hall 427
United States of America
Phone: (410) 5168545
Fax: (410) 516-7600
E-mail: akhan@jhu.edu