The selection committee for the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Pre-Doctoral Fellowship Program on the Economics of High-Skill Immigration has selected fourth-year PhD student Mishita Mehra as one of two Fellowship recipients for the 2017-2018 academic year. Fellows are selected based on the committee’s assessment of their "potential to make an important contribution to our understanding of the economics of high-skill immigration".
Mehra’s project, which will be conducted as an independent dissertation study, is titled “Skilled Immigration, Firms, and Policy.” High-skill immigration is a popular and timely area of inquiry among researchers in several macroeconomic areas, such as labor studies, trade, innovation economics, and public economics.
Indeed, considerable research has been conducted in the last three decades on related topics. Mehra's research differentiates itself from existing work by focusing on the role of firm demand of skilled immigrant labor in an international macroeconomic framework.
A native of India, Mehra grew up near New Delhi and attended the University of Delhi, earning her BA with Honors in Economics, and her MA at the Delhi School of Economics. She worked as a correspondent for The Economic Times of India and as a research assistant with the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER) before coming to UW in 2013. As a teaching assistant in the department, she has taught Intermediate Macroeconomics, Introduction to Macroeconomics, and Introduction to Microeconomics.
Mehra is grateful to the department for supporting her research and to Professor Fabio Ghironi, chair of her dissertation committee, for his guidance and support. “This award would not have been possible without Professor Ghironi’s encouragement,” she said.
NBER Fellows are expected to focus primarily on their research during the Fellowship year and will be invited to any specialized meetings that the NBER holds on the topic of high-skill immigration. The award comes with a $25,000 stipend, as well as a tuition payment of up to $12,000, made possible through generous support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.