Research

My research agenda is centred around economic questions related to rural dynamics in developing countries, particularly financial behaviour, labour, cognition, and inequalities in rural South India. The methods I use are determined by the research questions that arise but revolve around rigorous statistical analysis (e.g., econometrics, machine learning). I attach great importance to the quality of the data used, and in the interests of transparency and respect for ethical principles, all the R and Stata scripts developed to conduct the statistical and econometric analyses of my research work are freely accessible here.

Publications in peer-reviewed journals

  1. Guérin, I., Natal, A., Nordman, C. J., & Venkatasubramanian, G. (forthcoming). For Money Can’t Buy Me Love? The Political Economy of Marriages at the Time of Financialization. Contemporary South Asia.
  2. Nordman, C. J., Venkatasubramanian, G., Guérin, I., Natal, A., Mouchel, C., Michiels, S., & Di Santolo, M. (forthcoming). Networks, Employment, Debt, Mobilities, and Skills in India Survey (NEEMSIS): Presentation of a longitudinal data collection tool. Population.
  3. Natal, A., & Nordman, C. J. (2025). Psychology of Debt in Rural South India. The Journal of Development Studies. DOI: 10.1080/00220388.2025.2451871. [WP version available here »]
  4. Di Santolo, M., Guérin, I., Michiels, S., Mouchel, C., Natal, A., Nordman, C. J., & Venkatasubramanian, G. (2024). A Decade in Rural Tamil Nadu: Socio-Economic, Labour and Migration Trends from an Original Longitudinal Household Survey. Economic & Political Weekly, 59(43), 62-71. [WP version available here »]
  5. Natal, A., & Nordman, C. J. (2022). Locus of Control, Social Identity, and Indebtedness in South India. Revue d’Économie du Développement, 31(2-3), 95–101. DOI: 10.3917/edd.362.0095. [Available here »]
  6. Guérin, I., Michiels, S., Natal, A., Nordman, C. J., & Venkatasubramanian, G. (2022). Surviving Debt and Survival Debt in Times of Lockdown. Economic & Political Weekly, 57(1), 41–49. [Available here »]

In progress

  1. Tangled Up in Debt: Household Debt Trap and Its Effect on Spending in Rural India.
  2. She Works Hard for the Money: Debt Burden and Labour Supply in India, with C. J. Nordman.
  3. A Change is Gonna Come: Measures and Stability of Personality Traits in Rural South India, with C. J. Nordman.
  4. Personality Traits, Social Identity and Social Networks in Rural India, with D. Girollet.
  5. Unveiling Inequality in Rural South India: A Decade of Rising Income and Wealth Imbalances, with C. J. Nordman.
  6. On The Contribution of Personality Traits to Economics in the Global South, with C. J. Nordman.

Policy briefs

  1. On the importance of measuring personality traits in household surveys, ODRIIS Policy Brief No. 3, with B. Kar, and C. J. Nordman. (2025). [Available here »]
  2. Measuring, regulating and preventing household debt to better combat poverty, ODRIIS Policy Brief No. 2, with S. Michiels, I. Guérin, and T. Narring. (2025). [Available here »]
  3. Why and how to measure household debt in informal economies?, ODRIIS Policy Brief No. 1, with I. Guérin, and G. Venkatasubramanian. (2024). [Available here »]

Blog post

  1. The Urgent Need to Better Measure Household Debt, Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt (CADTM), with S. Michiels, I. Guérin, and T. Narring. (2025) [Available here »]

Technical reports

  1. Rapport d’Enquête Création d’une revue d’articles sur des jeux de données Data Journal SHS, Tech. rep. No. hal-04541094, with L. Bizien, V. Cohoner, F. Edmond, and P. Peraldi-Mittelette. (2024). MSH Lorraine

Data

  1. Network, Employment, dEbt, Mobility, and Skills in South India Survey (NEEMSIS-2, 2020-2021), with C. J. Nordman, G. Venkatasubramanian, I. Guérin, S. Michiels, C. Mouchel, and M. Di Santolo. (2025). DataSuds. DOI 10.23708/D7NADX
  2. NEEMSIS-1 wave data, with C. J. Nordman, I. Guérin, G. Venkatasubramanian, S. Michiels, Y. Lanos, A. Hilger, S. Kumar, and A. Raj. (2023). Harvard Dataverse. DOI: 10.7910/DVN/KN3KFJ
  3. RUME survey data, with I. Guérin, G. Venkatasubramanian, S. Michiels, and M. Roesch. (2023). Harvard Dataverse. DOI: 10.7910/DVN/2KVFXG

Created with the distill package and RStudio. Freely hosted on .
Author: Arnaud Natal. Last updated on April, 2025.