Siddharth Chandra

Professor and Director Michigan State University

  • East Lansing MI

An expert on: Asia; demography; drug policy, trafficking, and use; economics; epidemiology; India; Indonesia; influenza; health; history.

Contact

Michigan State University

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Biography

I direct the Asian Studies Center and am Professor of Economics in James Madison College at Michigan State University. I received my Ph.D. in economics from Cornell University, A.M. (Ph.D. pass) in economics from the University of Chicago, and B.A. (with honors) in economics from Brandeis University. Prior to joining Michigan State University, I was Director of the Asian Studies Center and Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh.

My research interests include behavior and policy relating to addictive substances, the intersection of demography, economics, health, and history in Asia, and applications of portfolio theory to fields outside finance, for which the theory was originally developed.

I have received funding from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for my research, which has appeared or will appear in a variety of journals including American Psychologist, Emerging Infectious Diseases, American Journal of Epidemiology, Demography, Population Studies, Demographic Research, Drug and Alcohol Dependence, Nicotine and Tobacco Research, Tobacco Control, Experimental and Clinical Psychopharmacology, the International Journal of Drug Policy, the Journal of Research in Personality, the Journal of Regional Science, Land Economics, the Journal of Economic History, Explorations in Economic History, World Politics, The British Journal of Political Science, and The Journal of Asian Studies.

Geographic focus areas of my research include Indonesia and South Asia.

Industry Expertise

Education/Learning

Areas of Expertise

Influenza
India
Economics
Demography
Asia
Drug Policy, Trafficking, Use
Epidemiology
Indonesia

Education

Cornell University

Ph.D.

Economics

Brandeis University

B.A.

Economics

University of Chicago

A.M.

Economics

News

1918 Pandemic provides warning about COVID-19's future

Futurity  online

2021-02-15

After a decade studying a flu virus that killed approximately 15,000 Michigan residents, Siddarth Chandra, a professor in the James Madison College at Michigan State University, saw his research come to life as he watched the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. “It was so surreal,” says Chandra, who has a courtesy appointment in epidemiology and biostatistics. “All of a sudden, I was living my research.”

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How the Spanish flu of 1918 changed India

The Caravan  online

2018-10-19

ABOUT TEN YEARS AGO, when Indian-born health economist Siddharth Chandra took up the directorship of the Asian Studies Center at Michigan State University in East Lansing, he had barely given any thought to the 1918 flu pandemic. He was searching for data that would speak to an entirely different question—how governments have historically manipulated access to opium and other addictive drugs to control populations and raise revenue—and his focus was the Dutch East Indies, or Indonesia, in the early-twentieth century. Realising that Indian population data for the same period was more detailed, he shifted his focus. Soon he noticed something odd: between the censuses carried out by the colonial authorities in 1911 and 1921, the Indian population had not grown as fast as it might have been expected to. He suspected that the reason was flu.

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The Virus That Killed 18 Million Indians

OPEN  online

2018-09-07

The paper’s author, Siddharth Chandra, director of Asian Studies Centre at the Michigan State University, had been working on an unrelated project on colonial India, for which he needed annual population statistics. He used data from the census of India, which was taken once every 10 years. When he looked at the figures for the Censuses of 1911 and 1921, he noticed that the population had grown far more slowly than it should have given the trajectory from prior decades.

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Journal Articles

Short-Term Birth Sequelae of the 1918–1920 Influenza Pandemic in the United States: State-Level Analysis

American Journal of Epidemiology

Siddharth Chandra, Julia Christensen, Svenn-Erik Mamelund, Nigel Paneth

2018

This paper examines short-term birth sequelae of the influenza pandemic of 1918–1920 in the United States using monthly data on births and all-cause deaths for 19 US states in conjunction with data on maternal deaths, stillbirths, and premature births. The data on births and all-cause deaths are adjusted for seasonal and trend effects, and the residual components of the 2 time series coinciding with the timing of peak influenza mortality are examined for these sequelae.

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New Findings on the Indonesian Killings of 1965–66

Cambridge Core

Siddharth Chandra

2017

The anti-communist killings of 1965–66 comprised the single most traumatic political event in independent Indonesia, with a consensus estimate of approximately 500,000 deaths. However, these estimates, along with a geographic and political characterization of the killings, have been informed exclusively by anecdotal accounts. In this article, available census data are used in conjunction with demographic analysis to provide a comprehensive and systematic picture of the killings.

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How MDMA flows across the USA: evidence from price data

Global Crime

Siddharth Chandra, Yan-Liang Yu & Vinay Bihani

2016

This study uses wholesale prices of MDMA for 59 cities in the USA published by the National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC) over the period of 2002–2011 to identify trafficking patterns of MDMA. Price differentials and correlations between pairs of cities are used to infer the presence of a link and the direction of flow of MDMA. The presence of inward and outward links is used to categorise each city as a ‘source’, ‘destination’, ‘transit’, or ‘weakly integrated’ city. The analysis identified low prices close to the Canadian and Mexican borders, in a number of cities such as Chicago, Miami, New York City, a trio of cities in the Carolinas, and along the West Coast. A number of these cities are linked to large numbers of other cities, indicating hub- or source-like status. The findings generate insights into the status of major US cities in the MDMA trafficking network.

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