I am a PhD candidate in Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and I expect to complete my degree in June 2026.
My research lies at the intersection of demography, education, and labor markets in developing countries, with a particular focus on women’s economic and social outcomes. I study how large-scale policy changes such as expansions in schooling and shifts in labor market opportunities shape key life decisions such as education, marriage, fertility, and intra-household dynamics. By combining multiple data sources and leveraging policy variation across cohorts and regions, I examine how institutional changes affect both individual outcomes and broader social structures.
In my job market paper, I examine the long-term effects of school construction on marriage markets in India. I show how increased access to education affects not only women’s schooling attainment, but also marriage timing and patterns of assortative matching.
You can view my CV here.
Using staggered school construction across Indian districts, I estimate the effects of increased school access on women’s educational attainment and marriage outcomes. An additional school per 1,000 school-age children increases women’s schooling by 0.12 years. Exposure to school construction also delays marriage by 0.04 years, reduces the spousal age gap by 0.03 years, and lowers the probability of child marriage by 0.3 percentage points. Marriage markets have become increasingly stratified at the bottom of the education distribution, while assortative mating has weakened at higher education levels. School construction contributes to these trends by strengthening educational sorting: each additional school raises the assortative mating index by 1.4 percent. Back-of-the-envelope calculations imply that school expansion accounts for approximately 28 percent of the observed rise in assortative mating. These findings suggest that education expansion amplified stratification in marriage markets instead of mitigating it.
I estimate the effect of an expansion in employment opportunities available to women in India on their marriage and fertility choices. While overall female labour force participation in India has stagnated at very low levels, women’s participation in the workfare program, the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, is fairly high. Using the staggered adoption of this workfare program across Indian districts for identification, I estimate whether the program had an effect on rates of marriage, fertility and sex ratio at birth. In my analysis, conditional on district covariates interacted with time in an age-adjusted model, the introduction of the workfare program led to 7.6 fewer marriages per 1000 women (3.6 fewer marriages based on the heterogeneity-robust estimator). Conceptions ending in live births per 1000 women fell by 19.1 in the 20-24 age group but rose by 15.5 in the 25-29 age group, indicating a shift towards later childbearing which may potentially reduce overall fertility in the long-run.
Email: akanksha_arora@ucsb.edu