Professor Sonia Bhalotra

Summary

Sonia is investigating institutional and behavioural constraints upon the creation of human capital. She has active research programmes on the long run benefits of childhood health interventions, educational reform, conflict, the political economy of public service delivery, intergenerational transmission of human capital and poverty, and the dynamics of mortality, fertility and sex selection. Her research is in collaboration with economists and some non-economists located in the US, Europe, India, Brazil, Chile and Mexico. She is currently analysing survey and census data from a number of developing countries, historical data from America, Norway, Denmark and Sweden and cross-country micro-macro data. Her research has been funded by grants from the ESRC, DFID, Nuffield Foundation and Grand Challenges Canada.

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Biography

Sonia is Professor in the Department of Economics and a member of the Senior Management Teams of the Centre for Market and Public Organisation and the Townsend Centre for International Poverty Research in Bristol. Her current membership of scientific committees includes the Council of the European Society of Population Economics, the International Review Panel of the Danish Council for Independent Research, the Advisory Board of Academics Stand Against Poverty (Yale), the International Scientific Advisory Board of the Centre for Modern Indian Studies in Gottingen University, the British Academy Area Panel for South Asia, the Assessment Panel for the ESRC Future Research Leaders Scheme and the ESRC Peer Review College. She is a Research Fellow at SFI Denmark, IZA Bonn, CHILD Turino, CSAE Oxford and QEH Oxford and she spent 2011-2012 as a Visiting Professor in Oxford. She has contributed policy relevant research to several international organisations and is a member of the IGC India network. Sonia holds an MPhil and a DPhil from Oxford and a BSc from Delhi.

Teaching

ECONM3003: MSc Topics in Development Economics
ECONM1008: MSc Applied Economics
ECONM3006: MSc Advanced Topics in Economic Analysis
Intercalated BSc in International Health (School of Medicine)

Keywords

• Development economics
• household economics
• demography
• labour economics and political economy.

Expertise

My current research interests are motivated by welfare issues in low-income economies. My recent work is concerned with child mortality, malnutrition, child labour, primary education, intra-household resource allocation, altruism, gender, and imperfections in credit and labour markets. I have used large-scale integrated household survey data from Africa and Asia in my research. My doctoral work was concerned with questions of labour demand, wage dispersion, and aggregate unemployment and productivity. This analysis used industry-state panel data that covered the early phase of economic reform in India.

Memberships

Organisations

Department of Economics

Other sites

• Efm
• Populationhealth

Selected publications

• Bhalotra, S & Rawlings, S 2012, ‘Gradients of the Intergenenerational Transmission of Health in Developing Countries’. Review of Economics and Statistics.

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Recent publications

• Akresh, R, Bhalotra, S, Leone, M & Osili, U 2012, ‘War and Stature: Growing up during the Nigerian-Biafran War’. American Economic Review P&P.
• Bhalotra, S 2012, ‘Poverty and Survival’. Journal of Development Studies.
• Bhalotra, S & Rawlings, S 2011, ‘Intergenerational Persistence in Health in Developing Countries: the Penalty of Gender Inequality’. Journal of Public Economics, vol 95., pp. 286 - 299

View complete publications list in the University of Bristol publications system