Sonia Bhalotra is Professor of Economics at the University of Warwick. She obtained an MPhil and DPhil from Oxford and a BSc Hons from Delhi. She is a labour economist by training with research expertise in health (including mental health), gender and political economy. She uses the full range of applied micro methods in her research- evaluation of policy and natural experiments using administrative and survey data, randomized control trials (field and online), and lab and lab-in-field experiments.

Her research has contributed to understanding skill creation; the long run benefits of early life health interventions, maternal and child health including maternal depression and adolescent mental health; gender inequality in the labour market, in political leadership and in the home; fertility (including abortion and IVF); domestic violence; workplace sexual harassment; and women’s inheritance rights. Her research uses data from Denmark, Sweden, Norway, the UK, Italy, America, India, Pakistan, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Nigeria. 

Sonia is Fellow of the International Economic Association, Fellow of the Royal Economic Society, of the Academy of Social Sciences, the Institute for Fiscal Studies London, the Centre for Economic Policy Research London, CeSifo Munich, Rockwool Foundation Berlin, IEPS Brazil and MLIV Chile. She is part-time Professor at Erasmus University Amsterdam.

Sonia is Principal Investigator on an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council on the economics of violence against women, Co-investigator CAGE ESRC Research Centre Warwick and co-lead of the Wellbeing (and mental health and gender) theme; Co-Investigator ESRC Research Centre on Micro-Social Change at ISER Essex and leader of the Families theme; and PI or Co-I or named collaborator on a series of Gates Foundation and NIH funded projects on maternal depression and child development (see https://www.bachpanstudy.com/study-team-1). She was recently Co-Investigator ESRC Project on Human Rights, Big Data and Technology at the Human Rights Centre Essex, leading the Health and Human Rights theme.

She is on the Council of the Royal Economic Society, the RES Standards of Conduct Committee, the Women in Economics Committee of the European Economic Association and she is Associate Editor at the Economic Journal.

She is on the International Advisory Board of the EqualNovaEra project in Lisbon, the Family Planning Impact consortium of the Guttmacher Foundation, the FaMiGrowth project in France, a UK NIHR consortium on migration and health, the Oxford Research Encyclopaedia Economics and Finance, and Academics Stand against Poverty at Yale.  She was recently on the International Advisory Board of the Lancet Commission on Women in Science, Medicine and Health, and the Evidence Panel of the Early Intervention Foundation London.

Sonia has acted as Keynote or Panellist in both academic and policy conferences on about 40 occasions in the last five years. She has been a Visiting Professor at Berkeley, Oxford, Cambridge, Chicago, Munich, Essen and Gothenburg. She has served on Scientific Committees at the WHO, UNICEF, ILO, British Academy, the European Society of Population Economics Council, the International Review Panel of the Danish Research Council, several ESRC committees, and she was a CROP Research Fellow at Bergen.

She recently submitted commentary and evidence to the UK House of Commons Library and to the Public Accounts Committee on the current government's strategy for addressing violence against women, and to the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology on postpartum depression and its persistent impacts on employment and parenting.

She has or has had collaborations with academics in Politics, Psychiatry, Philosophy, Medicine, Epidemiology, Law, Criminology.

Her AER March 2020 paper with Victoria Baranov, Pietro Biroli and Joanna Maselko was covered in AER Research Highlights: https://www.aeaweb.org/research/maternal-depression-cognitive-behavioral-therapy. And summarised in this Video: https://youtu.be/gFbFi7LTWaI

Her daughter Sameera made this video of her 2013 paper on cognitive development and infectious disease:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kP374sjvEFM

The IGC/LSE created this video of her paper showing that economic growth improves under women legislators: https://www.theigc.org/multimedia/are-women-politicians-good-for-economic-growth/