Sultan Mehmood is an associate professor of economics at the New Economic School in Moscow. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from France in October 2019. Previously, he studied in the Netherlands, Italy, and Pakistan. His primary fields are Development Economics and Political Economy, and he uses natural and field experiments to study how law, politics, and history shape economic development. He studies some of the central questions in development and political economy: how states build capacity, how courts constrain power, and why weak institutions persist. His work uses large-scale data, field experiments, and historical evidence to understand these institutional forces and what, if anything, can change them.