Research

My research agenda is centred around economic questions related to rural dynamics in developing countries, particularly financial behaviour, labour, cognition, and inequalities in 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. Natal, A., & Nordman, C. J. (2026). A Change is Gonna Come: Universality, Stability, and Shocks in Personality Traits in Rural India. The Journal of Development Studies (forthcoming).
  2. Guérin, I., Natal, A., Nordman, C. J., & Venkatasubramanian, G. (2025). For Money Can’t Buy Me Love? The Political Economy of Marriages at the Time of Financialization. Contemporary South Asia, 33(2), 281-300. DOI: 10.1080/09584935.2025.2494605. [WP version available here »]
  3. Nordman, C. J., Venkatasubramanian, G., Guérin, I., Natal, A., Mouchel, C., Michiels, S., & Di Santolo, M. (2025). Networks, Employment, Debt, Mobilities, and Skills in India Survey (NEEMSIS): Presentation of a longitudinal data collection tool. Population, 80(1), 79-93. DOI: 10.3917/popu.2501.0079. [Full open access article]
  4. Natal, A., & Nordman, C. J. (2025). Psychology of Debt in Rural South India. The Journal of Development Studies, 61(7), 1042-1057. DOI: 10.1080/00220388.2025.2451871. [WP version available here »]
  5. 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 »]
  6. 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 »]
  7. 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 »]

Book chapters

  1. Natal, A., & Nordman, C. J. (2026). Big Five Personality Traits and Locus of Control: Challenges and Uses in the Global South. In R. Dimova (Ed.), Handbook of behavioural development economics. Edwar Elgar Publising. (forthcoming)
  2. Natal, A., & Nordman, C. J. (2026). Inégalités et mobilité de revenu dans des villages indiens : Résultats issus d’une micro-enquête longitudinale (2010-2020). In A.Tizziani, I.Georges, R.Chevrillon-Guibert, & R. Hawi (Eds.), Les Angles Morts des Inégalités: Dialogues disciplinaires, territoriales et thématiques dans les Suds. IRD Editions. (forthcoming)

Submitted

  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. Unveiling Inequality in Rural South India: A Decade of Rising Income and Wealth Imbalances, with C. J. Nordman.

In progress

  1. Determinants of Household Debt Trap in Thailand and Vietnam.
  2. How personality traits and social identity shape interpersonal networks of poor people? A case study in South India, with D. Girollet.
  3. The Ties That Bind: Lender-Borrower Relationships and Indebtedness in Rural South India, with D. Girollet.
  4. Multidimensional Poverty and Jatis in India, with C. J. Nordman.
  5. The Gender of Debt, Agrarian Transition and Social Reproduction, with I. Guérin and S. Michiels.

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 »] (accepted by the UNHR for the final report of the “Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth”)
  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 October, 2025.