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 U.S. farms replaced a shrinking year-round immigrant farm workforce with temporary H-2A guestworkers, and finds that farms hire about one guestworker for each settled worker lost.