The Symposium on Evidence of Economic Development — SEED — is a boutique symposium on the economics of development, broadly defined. It emerged out of a joint collaboration between Anindya Chakrabarti (IIM Ahmedabad), Pavel Chakraborty (University of Bath), and Ritwik Banerjee (IIM Bangalore), who founded it in 2024 with a simple aim: to create a setting in which development economists can sit with a small number of papers for long enough to say something useful about them.
SEED does not sit in one place. It caravans from one host institution to another, carrying its format and its community with it. Each edition is co-organised with a local host at the institution where the symposium lands that year, and the program is kept deliberately small so that every paper gets the time it deserves.
Development, at SEED, is read generously. The program draws on empirical, experimental, theoretical, and historical work alike — covering questions that cut across education and health, firms and trade, labor markets, institutions, gender, environment, behavior, and the political economy of policy. What unites the papers is not a single method or a narrow sub-field but a shared concern with how economies grow, how they fail to, and what the evidence actually tells us.
SEED was founded in 2024 by Anindya Chakrabarti, Pavel Chakraborty, and Ritwik Banerjee. Each edition is co-organised with a local host at the institution where the symposium lands that year.