Anwesha Bhattacharya is a PhD candidate in Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School and a PhD Affiliate at the Center for International Development. Her research interests lie at the intersection of development economics, political economy, and gender. Anwesha‘s work uses spatial and electoral data to understand the causes and consequences of political violence during elections in India. Additionally, she studies whether extreme heat plaguing India affects turnout during national elections and whether differential turnout has downstream effects on economic development. In collaboration with researchers at Inclusion Economics at Yale, she is studying the impact of smartphone and mobile internet access on gender norms, labor markets, and susceptibility to health-related misinformation among women in rural Chhattisgarh, India.
Before pursuing her PhD, Anwesha worked in Raipur, Chhattisgarh, and New Delhi as a Research Associate at Evidence for Policy Design on their gender portfolio. She holds a Master’s degree in International and Development Economics from Yale University and a Bachelor’s degree with Honors in Economics from Lady Shri Ram College in India.
Research interests: Political economy; South Asian politics; political violence; identity politics; development; inequality; gender.