Jheelum Sarkar

I am a PhD candidate in Economics at American University in Washington, DC. My research sits at the intersection of labor, gender, and development economics. I study how the future of work and large-scale shocks reshape who works and on what terms. My dissertation examines the relationship between telework exposure and women's economic wellbeing in emerging economies, where social norms often keep women at home. A second strand of my research connects environment, inequality, and labor markets. Across these projects, I build new measures from non-traditional data — applying text-as-data methods to occupation manuals and remote-sensing techniques to satellite imagery — and combine applied microeconometrics with machine learning.