Prasiddha Shakya (Sid)

I am a fourth-year PhD student in Economics at Colorado State University (CSU) currently researching on topics pertaining to economics of health and education. My dissertation basically focuses on the areas of education but I am also working on some other areas of research. The first area of research looks at the impacts of TRIO-funded programs on college outcomes for first-generation students here in the US. My second area of work looks at the teacher labor market in New Jersey public schools. Another area of research, which is not a part of my dissertation but the kind I am interested in, looks at the possibility of "social remittances" from migration. Utilizing the DHS surveys from Nepal and India, I evaluate whether having someone you know abroad changes behaviors of households back home.

I received my undergraduate degree in Mathematics from RCNJ where I also minored in Computer Science, Economics and International Studies. I think this has led me to become a huge proponent of interdisciplinary research and my research aims to utilize tools from various disciplines outside of those used in the "traditional" Economics literature. I also do a lot of quantitative work for the Institute for Reseach in Social Science (IRISS) at CSU which has further strengthened my belief that we need to incorporate a multi-disciplinary approach to better address questions in our field- specifically the fields of developmental economics and economics of health and education. I consider health and education to be the two most important areas a country should have good control over and thus am greatly interested in policy issues in these two areas since the status of these two sectors, in my opinion, largely dictates the quality of life citizens in those countries have.

I am currently actively trying to find datasets that look at whether family structure and specific work profession dynamics within a household have significant impact on both pre/post partum depression rates in developed countries. If you are someone interested in this type of work, please feel free to email me at pshakya "AT" colostate "dOt" edu and we can have a chat!

This semester, I am teaching two sections of Intermediate Macroeconomics at CSU. My Office Hours are on Monday 1-2 pm and Tuesday 11-1pm at Clark C311! Students, refer to the syllabus on Canvas for the online link to my office hour session.