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Sakshi Bhardwaj earned her PhD in economics in May 2024 from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign . She is a proud advisee of Dr. Benjamin Marx. She plans to begin her career as an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.
She is an applied microeconomist and specializes in labor and public economics, particularly the effects of social safety net policies on low-income populations in the United States. In her job market paper, titled "Income during Infancy Reduces Crime: Evidence from a Discontinuity in Tax Benefits," Sakshi explores the impact of augmenting the income of economically disadvantaged parents shortly after childbirth—a time of acute financial need and high stress—on their involvement in criminal activities. Using administrative data from Pennsylvania, she finds that this income transfer reduces fathers' involvement in the criminal justice system, thereby preventing disruptions to the family.
She is committed to continuing her work in an area that not only studies the lives of these individuals but also strives to bring about policy changes to improve the quality of human life and make the world a more equitable place. Her research objective is to use causal inference methods to deepen our understanding of the circumstances faced by marginalized and underprivileged populations and provide valuable insights for policymaking.
Her work has been supported by the Economics Summer Research Award in 2021 and the Robert Willis Harbeson Memorial Dissertation Fellowship in 2022. She has also received multiple travel grants, enabling her to present her work at several top conferences during her PhD studies.
She is passionate about teaching and independently designed and taught the Econ 490 (Behavioral Economics) course for four semesters. She was actively involved with the Education Justice Project, where she taught at an all-male prison in Illinois, assisting incarcerated individuals who were taking credit courses to complete their bachelor’s degrees.