Aashay Tripathi
Ph.D. Economics
On the 2025–26 Job Market
As a development economist, I study how state institutions shape the lives of Indigenous and marginalized communities in India, focusing on education, conflict, and intra-household decision-making. My job market paper is the first causal study of residential schools and Indigenous women's education in India. It received the EPDC Best Student Research Paper award and the Best Graduate Poster at the Canadian Economics Association in 2025.
Before beginning my PhD, I led teams working on projects in education, water and sanitation, and health in the remote villages of India's Naxalite region. Having managed field and survey projects with teams of 25-30, I have extensive experience leading on-the-ground data collection and collaborating with government agencies, NGOs, and Indigenous communities on policy and program evaluation. That field experience continues to shape both the questions I ask and how I think about data.
I am on the 2025–26 job market.
Job Market Paper
Impact of Residential Schools on Educational Attainment of Indigenous Women: Evidence from India
While residential schools in North America have long been dismantled, India continues to expand its own residential school system for Indigenous communities. I provide the first causal evidence of the effect of these schools on the educational attainment of Indigenous women in India. I construct a novel dataset linking every Eklavya Model Residential School (EMRS) to nationally representative survey clusters and village-level demographics. Using a triple-difference design that exploits variation in indigenous status, school presence, and cohort eligibility, I find that EMRS exposure reduces completed schooling by 1.5 years and lowers secondary completion by 18 percentage points. As a robustness check, an instrumental-variables specification that uses the interaction of forest cover and cohort eligibility as an instrument for exposure confirms the direction and yields a complier estimate of roughly four fewer years. The mechanism runs through household labor demands: because EMRS requires full-year residence on campus, families lose access to daughters' domestic labor, and dropout attributable to domestic work rises by 10 percentage points. This, along with the phasing out of day-school options, indicates that a residential model can lower attainment for the intended beneficiaries when it overlooks the time constraints of socioeconomically marginalized households.
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Insuring the Girl Child: Deferred Incentives and the Fertility-Human Capital Trade-Off in India
I study a conditional cash transfer (CCT) scheme that rewards below-poverty-line households for having a daughter who completes a minimum level of schooling and delays marriage. Because the scheme was implemented only in the Indian state of Karnataka, I use NFHS microdata and a border regression discontinuity design to compare eligible households just inside Karnataka with otherwise similar households just across the state boundary. Households on the Karnataka side are 15 percentage points more likely to have a girl under age 10 and 10 percentage points more likely to have a boy under age 10, with no change in sex ratios. This pattern is consistent with an `insurance' mechanism: by reducing the expected future financial liability associated with a daughter, the scheme lowers the cost of continued childbearing. Families then continue fertility in pursuit of a highly desired son, rather than substituting daughters for sons. Despite the scheme's conditions and financial incentives, girls' schooling outcomes worsen: completed years of education fall by 1.85 years, and secondary attendance declines by 18 percentage points. Immunization does not change. Survey responses suggest that higher fertility increases the burden on mothers and makes existing barriers to health-care use, such as permission norms, distance, the need for accompaniment, and the lack of a female provider, more binding.
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Political Alignment, Anti-Poverty Programs, and Conflict
Anti-poverty programs can alter conflict dynamics, but their effects may depend on local political conditions. This paper examines whether political alignment between local representatives and the ruling state government changes the security consequences of India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). Using a difference-in-discontinuities design that combines close state assembly elections with the phased rollout of NREGA, I estimate the additional effect of political alignment on violence when the program is operational. I show that in Naxalite-affected areas, aligned constituencies in NREGA districts experience more violence, especially clashes between state forces and rebels. The evidence is consistent with more effective program implementation in aligned constituencies, strengthening the state's local reach and threatening insurgents' recruitment base and territorial control, thereby prompting escalation. By contrast, I find no clear evidence of a comparable effect in Northeast India's ethnic insurgencies, where mobilization is less tied to short-run economic deprivation. The results show that political alignment changes the security consequences of NREGA, and that these consequences depend on the structure of the underlying conflict.
PhD Teaching Assistant Excellence Prize — Department of Economics, University of Calgary (2022–2023)
- Computer Applications in Economics Spring 2026
- Principles of Macroeconomics Spring 2025
- Engineering Economics (Undergraduate, 2nd Year) Spring 2023
- Energy Systems: Planning & Energy Economics
- Markets and Public Policy
- Microeconomic Theory
- Health Economics
- Principles of Microeconomics
- Principles of Macroeconomics
- Intermediate Microeconomics
- Intermediate Macroeconomics
- Advanced Econometrics
- Money and Banking
- Labor Economics
- Economics of the Movie Business
- Managerial and Decision Economics
- Economics of Business Fundamentals
- Energy Economics and Policy
- Economics of Financial Markets
- SSHRC Insight Development Grant (with Arvind Magesan, Sacha Kapoor, and Michael Vlassopoulos) 2025–2027
- Best Student Research Paper, Economics Profession Data Committee, Canadian Economics Association 2025
- Best Graduate Poster, Canadian Economics Association 2025
- Eyes High International Doctoral Scholarship, University of Calgary 2024–2025
- Doctoral Completion Scholarship, University of Calgary 2023–2024
- PhD Teaching Assistant Excellence Prize, Department of Economics, University of Calgary 2022–2023
- Anton and Dalgarno Memorial Graduate Scholarship, University of Calgary 2020–2021
- Pre-candidacy Award, University of Calgary 2019–2020
- Faculty of Graduate Studies Scholarship, University of Calgary 2018–2020
- Economics Alumni Graduate Scholarship, University of Calgary 2018–2019
- CEA Annual Conference, Vancouver 2026
- EPDC Student Research Competition, CEA Annual Conference, Montreal 2025
- Graduate Poster Presentation, CEA Annual Conference, Montreal 2025
- CEA Annual Conference, Montreal 2025
- CEA Annual Conference, Toronto 2024
- International Conference on Empirical Economics, Penn State Altoona 2023
- CEA Annual Conference, Winnipeg 2023
- Graduate Poster Presentation, CEA Annual Conference, Winnipeg 2023
- German Development Economics Conference, Dresden 2023
- Research Symposium, IFMR Business School, India 2023
University of Calgary