Anjali Adukia

Anjali Adukia is an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and the director of the MiiE Lab (Messages, Identity, and Inclusion in Education). In her work, she seeks to understand how children from all backgrounds can have opportunities to realize their potential. Adukia's work draws on large-scale data, often deriving data from previously unused and underused sources, including employing artificial intelligence (AI) methods to expand the tools and data used in social science.

Adukia has received an NSF CAREER Award in economics (2024-2029), the SREE Early Career Award (2023), the William T. Grant Foundation Scholar Award (2018-2023), the NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship (2018), and an Institute of Education Sciences grant (2020-2022).  Her doctoral thesis won best dissertation awards from APPAM and AEFP. Her research has received awards from Google and has been featured in media outlets such as Scientific American, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Education Week, School Library Journal, and NPR.

Adukia is a faculty research fellow at NBER in the Economics of Education and Children and Families groups, a research fellow at the IZA Institute of Labor Economics, a non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development, and a faculty affiliate of the University of Chicago Education Lab.  She is on the editorial boards of Education Finance and Policy, Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness, and Journal of Social Computing (IEEE).  She co-organizes the annual AI in Social Sciences conference at The University of Chicago. She completed her doctoral degree at Harvard University, with a focus on the economics of education. She has a masters of education from Harvard University and a bachelor of science degree in molecular and integrative physiology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Working Papers

"Separation of Church and State Curricula? Examining Public and Religious Private School Textbooks" (with E. Harrison) 

"From Retributive to Restorative: An Alternative Approach to Justice" (with B. Feigenberg, F. Momeni) (2024, Revision Invited at American Economic Review)

"Residential Segregation and Unequal Access to Local Public Services in India: Evidence from 1.5m Neighborhoods" (with S. Asher ⓡ K. Jha ⓡ P. Novosad ⓡ B. Tan) (December 2023, Revision Invited at American Economic Review)

Published Papers

"What We Teach About Race and Gender: Representation in Images and Text of Children’s Books" (with A. Eble, E. Harrison, H.B. Runesha, T. Szasz) (2023, The Quarterly Journal of Economics)

"Reparative Ripple Effects? Exploring the Impacts of Sibling Exposure to School-Based Restorative Justice" (with B. Feigenberg, F. Momeni) (2024, American Economic Association Papers and Proceedings)

"Tales and Tropes: Gender Roles from Word Embeddings in a Century of Children’s Books" (with P. Chiril, C. Christ, A. Das, A. Eble, E. Harrison, H.B. Runesha) (2022, Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING))  [Video]   [Poster]   [Slides]

"Economic and Social Development along the Urban-Rural Continuum: New Opportunities to Inform Policy"
(with A. Cattaneo, D. Brown, L. Christiaensen, D.K. Evans, A. Haakenstad, T. McMenomy, M. Partridge, S. Vaz, D. Weiss) (2022, World Development)  [Blog Post with D.K. Evans: Most Out-of-School Children are in Rural Areas. Education Systems Must Serve Them Better.]

“Portrayals of Race and Gender: Sentiment in 100 Years of Children's Literature” (with C. Christ, A. Das, A. Raj) (2022, Proceedings of the ACM SIGCAS/SIGCHI Conference on Computing and Sustainable Societies (ACM COMPASS '22))  [Video]

"Measuring Representation of Race, Gender, and Age in Children's Books: Face Detection and Feature Classification in Illustrated Images" (with T. Szasz, E. Harrison, P-J. Liu, P-C. Lin, H.B. Runesha) (2022, Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV))   [Poster]    [Video]

"Spillover Impacts on Education from Employment Guarantees" (2022, Education Finance and Policy)  [Takeaway (one-pager)]

"Religion and Sanitation Practices"
(with M. Alsan, K. Babiarz, J. Goldhaber-Fiebert, and L. Prince)  (2021, World Bank Economic Review)

"Educational Investment Responses to Economic Opportunity: Evidence from Indian Road Construction"
(with S. Asher and P. Novosad) (2020, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics)   [Slides]

"Sanitation and Education" (2017, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics)   [Slides]

Other Writings: Policy Briefs, Op-Eds, Blog Posts

Road connectivity and rural economic development: Evidence from India’s rural roads programme (with S. Asher and Paul Novosad), VoxDev, July 2022.

India's National Education Policy: A need to look beyond the classroom to improve results, VoxDev, November 2019.

How sanitation facilities in schools can improve educational outcomes, Ideas for India, August 2018.

Promoting Education through School Sanitation, World Bank Development Impact, March 2014.

"The Impact of the Financial Crisis on Tertiary Education World Wide" (with B. Long) World Bank, September 2009.

"The Broadmoor Project New Orleans Community Engagement Initiative: Progress Report" (with D. Ahlers, M. Blakley, L. Cole, M. El Dahshan, A. Hodari, H. Ko, J. Maeso, A. Noble, D. Radcliffe, M. Richards, C. Valentine, A. Van, D. Walsh, A. Watson, A. Woods, C. Wood, J. Wright, K. Yang). Harvard Kennedy School - Broadmoor Initiative, March 2007.