Anjali Pai, Ph.D.

Anjali Pai, Ph.D.

Senior Research Associate at the Annenberg Institute at Brown

Biography

I am an applied microeconomist with interests in education policy, labor policy, and improving equity for disadvantaged groups. I currently work as a Senior Research Associate at the Annenberg Institute at Brown University, where I study the relationship between postsecondary pathways and labor market outcomes.

I received my Ph.D. in Economics from UC San Diego in June 2024. Across my work, I use rigorous quasi-experimental and experimental methods to assess the impact of programs and policies. My academic research focused on barriers to entering STEM fields for women and underrepresented minorities and programs to improve adolescent mental health.

Interests

  • Education, health, and labor policy
  • Workforce development
  • Equity-focused and policy-relevant research

Education

  • Ph.D. in Economics, 2024

    University of California, San Diego

  • M.A. in Economics, 2020

    University of California, San Diego

  • B.A. in Economics, 2019

    Williams College

  • B.A. in Computer Science, 2019

    Williams College

Preparing for Publication

October 2023

The Effect of School-Based Health Care on Adolescent Behavior and Mental Health

This paper looks at the effect of access to a School-Based Health Center on suspensions and dropouts, two metrics that may be strong proxies for adolescent mental health status. Using a difference-in-differences model with a propensity-score matched sample of control schools, I find that in California, access to a school-based health center decreases school-level suspension rates by around 1.2 percentage points within 3 years of the opening.
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Working Papers

September 2023

What You Don't Know Might Deter You: The Effect of Information Provision on Minority Retention in Undergraduate Economics

Through an RCT at a large research university, I find that providing undergraduate students in an introductory Economics course with information about potential careers, income, research topics, and diversity in the field of Economics increases the likelihood of enrolling in a subsequent Economics course for underrepresented minority students by around 9.9 percentage points and that the information induces primarily lower-performing students to enroll.
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