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Mariel Bedoya
Columbia University
I am a Ph.D. candidate in Economics and Education at Columbia University and a CDEP Research Fellow. My research explores how early-career service shapes professionals’ long-term labor choices, at the intersection of labor economics, health, education, and public policy. My job market paper examines Peru’s mandatory rural health service program, showing lasting effects on public sector retention and rural service using administrative data and a lottery-based design. I also study barriers to equitable program delivery, the role of gender in curricula, and the effects of environmental shocks on education.
Alejandra Campos
Columbia University
Alejandra is a PhD candidate in Economics and Education at Columbia University, her research is focused on the intersection of early childhood development, neuroeconomics, and development economics. She explores the effects of poverty on skill development, how these factors may bias the measurement of educational outcomes, and their implications for the allocation of talent. Prior to joining Columbia University, she worked at the Center for the Economics of Human Development at the University of Chicago, where she contributed to evidence-based studies on inequality, human development, and investments in lifelong skill formation.
Mathilde Degois
ENS Paris-Saclay and AgroParisTech
I am a third-year PhD student in Economics at ENS Paris-Saclay and AgroParisTech, France, and a Fulbright Visiting PhD at UC Berkeley ARE in Spring 2026. Before my PhD, I graduated from ENS Paris-Saclay through its PhD track program, worked as a pre-doc at Tel Aviv University, and conducted fieldwork in India. My work sits at the intersection of development and environmental economics, with a particular interest in water-related challenges such as scarcity and irrigation. In my job market paper, I study how large-scale irrigation infrastructure shapes climate and, in turn, influences downwind development in India. I am always happy to discuss new research ideas and collaborations, so please feel free to reach out !
Anshika Mathur
Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence
Anshika is a Ph.D. candidate in Economics at Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence. Her research lies at the intersection of gender, labor, health economics, examining how social norms, state programs, and institutional capacity shape human capital formation in traditional settings.
Lorena Moreno
Tufts University
Lorena Moreno is an economist and PhD student in Economics and Public Policy at Tufts University, where she studies how households transmit, or break, patterns across generations through policies, behaviors, and structural conditions. Her research spans gender, poverty and inequality, health, education, and child development, with a current focus on analyzing the determinants of intergenerational economic mobility in Ecuador, using linked administrative records and quasi-experimental methods. She holds graduate degrees from the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO) and the London School of Economics, and over the past decade has led large-scale survey and research projects in Ecuador's public sector, including at the national statistics institute (INEC), bridging rigorous quantitative research with real-world policy impact.
Yuma Noritomo
Cornell University
Yuma Noritomo is a Ph.D. candidate at the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management at Cornell University.
His research examines barriers to human capital investment that hinder pathways out of poverty, with a particular focus on child labor in low-income, high-risk environments. He studies how households make education decisions under conditions of climate variability and economic uncertainty, especially in pastoralist communities in Kenya and Ethiopia. Using both quasi-experimental and experimental methods, his work aims to inform policies that reduce vulnerability and improve long-term welfare.
Pietro Pellerito
University of Notre Dame
Pietro is a PhD candidate at the University of Notre Dame. As an applied microeconomist, he focuses in the areas of public, labor, and the economics of education. His job market paper uses both traditional and modern causal inference methods to study how school districts respond to inter-district open enrollment competition. Pietro's additional work examines light-touch graduation incentives and the labor market effects of dual minimum-wage policies. In his free time Pietro loves to play disc golf, go hiking, and watch football.
Takshil Sachdev
Cornell University
Takshil Sachdev is a PhD candidate in Economics at Cornell University working on applied and structural research at the intersection of labor and development economics. He is interested in understanding drivers of job creation, worker mobility, and firm labor market power in formal sectors across developing countries.
Sidi M. Sawadogo
Université de Montréal
Sidi Mohamed Sawadogo is a PhD candidate in Economics at the Université de Montréal. His research develops econometric methods for game-theoretic models and applies them to study strategic interactions in real-world markets. At the intersection of econometrics and industrial organization, his work focuses on firm competition, market structure, and public policy. Using structural modeling and welfare analysis, he provides quantitative insights into how policies shape market outcomes.
Mushegh Tovmasyan
University Paris-Saclay
I am a fourth-year PhD candidate in Economics at the University Paris-Saclay. My research focuses on international trade, development, and labor economics, with a particular interest in geoeconomics. In my job market paper, I study how geoeconomic fragmentation, namely sanctions, affects firms and firm-level trade in neutral economies, with a focus on Armenia. I am also contributing to a joint effort with the State Revenue Committee of Armenia and the Armenian Center for Research in Economics to help develop Armenian administrative microdata for research
Sai Zhang
University of Southern California
Sai Zhang is a fifth-year PhD candidate in Economics at the University of Southern California (USC). His research interests are in labor economics and behavioral economics, with a focus on how economic, behavioral, and cultural factors shape individual decision making and market dynamics. Sai is originally from China. Before joining USC, he received his Bachelor’s degree in Economics and Finance from Tsinghua University, and worked at the London Business School as a predoctoral research fellow.
Lightning Rounds
Yu Qiu
University of Pittsburgh
Yu Qiu is a PhD candidate in Economics at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research lies in development, labor, political economy, and economic history, drawing on both contemporary and historical settings to study how institutions shape the labor market and economic development.
Mithila Abraham Sarah
University of Surrey
Mithila is a PhD candidate in economics at the University of Surrey. Her research lies in development and public economics, with a focus on old-age social protection in developing countries. Using applied microeconometric methods, she studies how pension policies influence household behaviour and gender outcomes.
Enakshi Bera
Indiana University Bloomington
Enakshi Bera is a PhD Student in Economics at Indiana University Bloomington. Her research lies at the intersection of development economics and international trade, with a focus on how market access, spatial trade costs, and government policy shape agricultural productivity and farmer welfare in developing economies. She uses large administrative and survey datasets combined with spatial methods to study these questions, with applications to India and other developing countries. Enakshi also teaches undergraduate macroeconomics and international trade at IU.
Alejandra Quintana-Barrera
Columbia University
Alejandra Quintana is a PhD candidate in Economics and Education at Columbia University’s graduate school of education, Teachers College. Her research lies at the intersection of development economics and education. She is particularly interested in how beliefs shape expectations about future events and influence decision-making in the education space. In one ongoing project, she studies how migration shocks affect expected returns to education and natives’ enrollment in higher education. In another, she examines how gender-biased language in Peru’s school curricula affects educational outcomes and parents’ beliefs. She holds a master’s degree in Economics from Universidad de los Andes, Colombia.
Shreya Chandra
University of California, Berkeley
I am a sixth year PhD candidate at the Agricultural and Resource Economics department at University of California, Berkeley. I study topics related to firms and labor markets, digitization and microfinance in developing countries. I previously worked as a research assistant at Evidence for Policy Design India, MIT Sloan and Harvard Business School. I completed my Bachelors in Economics from Delhi University, India and Masters in Development Economics from the Yale IDE program.
Epio Odette Bayala
Université de Sherbrooke
Epio Odette Bayala is a PhD candidate in Development Economics at the Université de Sherbrooke. Her research lies at the intersection of applied economics and environmental studies, examining how environmental and climate shocks affect well-being. Her current work explores the effects of toxic waste exposure and coastal erosion on human capital and health outcomes in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Francisco Pardo
University of Texas at Austin
Francisco Pardo is a PhD candidate in Economics at the University of Texas at Austin whose research explores how family dynamics shape human capital accumulation. His published work examines school quality and parental preferences, as well as the long-term effects of technology in education. His current research investigates how school closures caused children with siblings to experience substantially larger learning losses than only children, as well as sibling spillovers from college admissions decisions, joint decision-making in health insurance markets, and the role of partisan poll watchers in electoral results. He has previously worked at the Inter-American Development Bank on research projects in Caribbean countries and as a consultant for government and research institutions in Peru.
Gabriel Rodriguez-Puello
Jonkoping University
Gabriel is a 2026–2027 job market candidate from Jönköping International Business School (JIBS), where he is also a researcher at the Centre for Entrepreneurship and Spatial Economics (CEnSE). His research lies at the intersection of applied microeconomics, labor economics, and crime economics, with a focus on how economic opportunities and institutional conditions shape individual behavior and resource utilization. He employs a range of empirical methods, including difference-in-differences, instrumental variables, causal machine learning, and spatial analysis to study these questions using mine- and individual-level panel data. His job market paper examines the effect of mining activity on the criminal behavior of young males in Northern Sweden. Other work investigates how investment freedom causally shapes mine-level production across developing countries, and how economic opportunity affects fertility and family formation.
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