Aakansha Jain
PhD Candidate in Economics, Iowa State University. On the 2026–27 Economics Job Market.
My research studies how immigration, education, and access to opportunity shape workers and local labor markets in the United States and India, using applied microeconometric methods. I am advised by John Winters and Peter Orazem.
Job Market Paper: “The Rise of H-2A: Causal Evidence on Guestworker Substitution for Settled Farm Labor” — draft available here. The paper asks whether the decline in settled non-citizen farm workers contributed to the rise of the H-2A guestworker program, and finds that farms hire about one H-2A worker for each settled worker lost. This substitution accounts for 29 percent of aggregate H-2A growth since 2008.