Aashima Sinha

Aashima Sinha is a research scholar in the Institute’s Gender Equality and the Economy program. Her research interests span the fields of feminist, development, and labor economics. Currently, her research focuses on the micro- and macroeconomic implications of social reproduction. She investigates the gender-differentiated effects of unpaid care work time on the well-being outcomes of care providers in low- and middle-income countries. Additionally, she has developed composite scores for each state in the United States to analyze how the organization of social reproduction in the household, public, and market sectors impacts economic growth and overall societal development. Other areas of her research include violence against women, the human development costs of public space harassment, and international measures of gender inequality. She augments her research with policy evaluation and provides region-specific policy recommendations.

Aashima’s expertise includes conducting primary surveys in developing countries, including a
unique contextualized time-use survey in rural and urban areas of India. As part of a collaborative research project, she is currently implementing a randomized control trial in India to evaluate the impact of couple counselling intervention on sharing of unpaid work, women empowerment, gender norms, health, and overall well-being of couples and their children. Aashima has secured multiple grants to support her fieldwork research, including two grants from the Asian Development Bank Institute and one grant from the University of Utah’s 1U4U Innovative Research Funding Program.

During her doctoral program she has worked as a Research Assistant (RA) on various projects including a joint project of the Department of Economics and the Department of Public Health at the University of Utah, which examines the impact of public-space sexual harassment of women in the Global South and the role of men’s perception and social norms in perpetuating sexual
harassment. She also collaborated with Professor Günseli Berik as an RA, to evaluate and recommend theoretical and methodological improvements in UNDP’s gender indices including Gender Development Index and Gender Inequality Index.

Prior to her Ph.D., Aashima worked as an Analyst with consulting firms in India, where she provided research and advisory services to public authorities, private firms, and civil organization. Aashima holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Utah (2023), an M.A in economics from Jawaharlal Nehru University (2017) and a B.A (honors) in economics from the University of
Delhi (2014).

Publication(s)

•  Sinha, Aashima, Sedai, Ashish.K. Why Care for the Care Economy: Empirical Evidence from Nepal. Eastern Economic Journal 50, 337–373 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41302-024-00282-5
• Sinha et al. (2024). Well-being costs of unpaid care: Gendered evidence from a contextualized time-use survey in India.” World Development 173 (2024): 106419
• Capability Approach Lens to Public-space Sexual Harassment of Women: Evidence from India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan. (2024). Journal of Human Development and Capabilities, 26(1), 129–153. https://doi.org/10.1080/19452829.2024.2426979
  Men’s perspectives on public-space sexual harassment of women in South Asia. (2024). Global Public Health, 19(1). https://doi.org/10.1080/17441692.2024.2380845
• Elderly Caregiving: A Gendered Analysis on Caregivers’ Labor, Time-use,  and Well-being. Asian Economic Papers 2025; 24 (1): 159–177. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/asep_a_00934
• Diversity In Feminist Economics Research Methods: Trends from The Global South. (2025). Journal of Economic Methodology
• Sinha, Aashima and Sahai, Ragini. (2021). “Factors Influencing Unpaid Domestic Work: Empirical Evidence from India, Contributions to Indian Social Science.” Indian Association of Social Science Institutions (IASSI) Quarterly, Vol. 40.3.

Working Papers

• Reshaping Gender Norms and Building Trust: Evidence from a Community-Based Couple Counseling RCT (revise and resubmit, European Economic Review)
• The Road to Gender-Equitable Growth: A State-Level Analysis of Social Reproduction in the United States (revise and resubmit in Cambridge Journal of Economics).

Reports

• Thomas Masterson, Rania Antonopoulous, Ajit Zacharias, Fernando Rios-Avila, and Aashima Sinha (2024), Assessing the Impact of Social Care Expansion in Mexico: Time Use, Employment and Poverty, Levy Economics Institute Working paper series.
• Ajit Zacharias, Thomas Masterson, Fernando Rios-Avila, and Aashima Sinha (2025), Unpacking Poverty among employed people in the United States.  Levy Economics Institute.

Work in progress

• Employment Quality Index and Gender Earnings Gap: Case of Ghana and South Africa
• A Time and Income Poverty Measure:  Can Redistribution of Household Production Solve Time Poverty?
• Levy Institute Measure of Time and Income Poverty: United States, 2007-2022: “Sources, Methods, and Assessment”