Industrial organization expert Ujjwol Paudel joins Department of Agricultural & Applied Economics
Texas Tech has named Ujjwol Paudel, an economist whose work traces the mechanics of food prices and labor markets, as an assistant professor in its Department of Agricultural & Applied Economics. He will officially begin Sept. 1, university officials said.
'His specialization in industrial organization will add important expertise on market structure and operations, which directly addresses our strategic priority of economic systems.'
Paudel arrives from Arizona State University, where he served as a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Supply Chain Management. His research, rooted in industrial organization, examines how shocks ripple through food systems from wage policies to consumer demand and how firms respond.
“His specialization in industrial organization will add important expertise on market structure and operations, which directly addresses our strategic priority of economic systems,” said Darren Hudson, Davis College Associate Dean for Strategic Initiatives & Assessment and the Larry Combest Endowed Chair for Agricultural Competitiveness in the Department of Agricultural & Applied Economics.
“His subject matter will add understanding on how concentration in supply chains impact producers and consumers, which is a highly relevant topic today across livestock markets and agricultural inputs,” Hudson said.
In a series of studies, Paudel has analyzed how increases in minimum wages are transmitted to retail food prices, finding that the effects vary across products and markets and can, in some cases, accelerate the exit of less efficient firms. His work also explores labor monopsony - the degree of employer power in setting wages - in agricultural production and food retailing, focusing on the persistent gap between worker productivity and pay.
More recently, Paudel has turned to questions related to platform economics, examining how digital marketplaces such as Amazon are reshaping the way food and consumer goods reach buyers and who handles each step in between. The work draws on operations management, extending his research on supply chains to the logistics of online platforms.
Trained as a mathematician before moving into business economics, Paudel brings a technical toolkit that spans causal inference methods - including difference-in-differences and instrumental variables - as well as structural modeling of market power and bargaining. He has also employed machine learning techniques to study consumer behavior and firm strategy, working across programming languages such as R, Python and Stata, specialized tools used primarily for data analysis, statistical modeling and research.
“I am delighted to join a department that combines technical rigor with real engagement in the agricultural economy, and to study how market power, bargaining, and supply chain shocks impact firms, consumers, and workers in food markets,” Paudel said.
Paudel earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Jacobs University Bremen in Germany, a master’s degree in mathematics from ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich) in Switzerland, and a doctorate in business administration from Arizona State’s W. P. Carey School of Business.
He joins a department that has expanded in both size and scope in recent years. Texas Tech’s Department of Agricultural & Applied Economics includes 21 tenured or tenure-track faculty members, along with professors of practice and adjunct faculty, and serves more than 600 undergraduate and graduate students. The department offers undergraduate degrees in agribusiness and agricultural and applied economics, as well as graduate programs leading to master’s and doctoral degrees and a master of agribusiness.
CONTACT: Krishna Paudel, Chair, Department of Agricultural & Applied Economics, Davis College of Agricultural Sciences & Natural Resources, Texas Tech University at (806) 834-8360 or kripaude@ttu.edu
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