I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of South Carolina. In Spring 2026, I will be visiting the Department of Economics at Harvard University. 

I received my Ph.D. in Economics from Georgetown University in May 2022. From 2021 to 2022, I was a research fellow in the Women and Public Policy Program at the Harvard Kennedy School. I was a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Economics and Economic Growth Center at Yale University in 2023 and in the Department of Economics at Harvard University in 2024. 

My research focuses on development economics, labor economics and political economy, with an emphasis on gender inequality. I study how women’s decisions and outcomes, and household bargaining are shaped by formal and informal institutions—government policies, laws, the organization of the labor market and social norms—with a particular emphasis on domestic violence against women and women’s employment. My research spans East Africa, Europe, and the United States, aiming to understand the determinants of gender inequality and identify potential policies to reduce it. In my recent and ongoing work, I combine theory with a natural experiment or a field experiment and use a combination of large-scale administrative records, spatial data, and household surveys. I collaborate with various government institutions to build the administrative datasets that enable this research.

Email: deniz.sanin@moore.sc.edu

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