Hello, I am Manali!

I have a Ph.D. in Economics and Public Policy from Tufts University, focusing on labor and gender economics.

I study why policies meant to help women often don't, and what actually does. I use causal methods to evaluate programs at the intersection of gender, education, and work: how a subway expansion quietly transformed women's college enrollment in Delhi, why a well-intentioned school policy in India failed, how extreme heat is reshaping the time burden of women in Sub-Saharan Africa.

As an economist intern at Amazon, I brought that same instinct to industry: using difference-in-differences and machine learning to quantify the long-run revenue impact of product defects, and working across product, engineering, and data science teams to turn findings into decisions. 

I came to economics from engineering, which means I'm most comfortable when there's a hard empirical puzzle to solve and a real decision on the other end of it.