Rachel Brulé - biography

Rachel Brulé is completing a PhD in political science from Stanford University and is also a visiting researcher for BCR’s CORE project during spring 2011. Her dissertation examines the determinants of effective legal reform in rural India. Rachel utilizes survey data from 17 Indian states alongside interviews of nearly 1,000 individuals in Andhra Pradesh to determine when women are able to benefit from a recent law equalizing women’s rights to inherit property. She combines formal modeling of intra-household and intra-village conflict over resource distribution with qualitative and quantitative tests of her model’s observable implications.

Rachel Brulé has conducted research and policy implementation in the fields of development and post-conflict reconstruction over the past eleven years for the National Council of Applied Economic Research (Delhi), the World Bank (Hyderabad), MIT’s Poverty Action Lab (Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu), the International Labour Organization (Geneva), the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (Washington, DC), the US Department of Defense’s Office of Special Operations/ Low Intensity Conflict (Washington, DC), and a joint project with the Brookings Institute and the Consortium for Humanitarian Affairs (Colombo, Sri Lanka). She holds masters of science degrees in development economics (London School of Economics), forced migration (Oxford University’s Refugee Studies Centre), and political science (Stanford University).