Aakash Bhalothia

Aakash Bhalothia is currently a PhD Student in Economics at the University of California San Diego.

Bhalothia served as a predoctoral associate for Inclusion Economics from 2020-2021, working mainly on the IVRS project, which focused on investigating the impact of automated IVRS calls on bank usage rates for rural women in India. Aakash also got the opportunity to work with government datasets such as the Periodic Labor Force Survey to generate important descriptive facts about female labor force participation in India. He gained useful skills and insights into the research process. His work also heavily influenced his current research interests, as he continues to work on FLFP in India. Some broad areas of interest for him are: the implications of marriage migration on FLFP, increasing labor market attachment of young women before marriage, and reducing the perceived cost of norms among families.

My time as a predoctoral fellow at Yale EGC provided me with an invaluable intellectual work experience that prepared me for graduate school, and continues to inform my research on female labor force participation in India” – Aakash Bhalothia