Shanthi Nataraj is a Senior Economist and the Director of the Labor and Workforce Development Program at the RAND Corporation. She recently co-led two studies examining workers’ transitions between formal jobs, casual work, and self-employment in Bangladesh, as well as workers’ willingness to pay for specific working conditions. Her ongoing work on the effects of India’s trade and industrial policies on employment and productivity growth among formal and informal manufacturing firms has been published in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Development Economics, the Journal of International Economics and the World Bank Economic Review. She has also examined ways to better integrate Syrian refugees into labor markets in Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon; analyzed survey and administrative data to calculate Gross Regional Product for the Kurdistan Region of Iraq; studied the effects of tax policies, labor market regulations, and industrial policies on high-tech firm growth in China; analyzed the impacts of labor regulations on employment in low-income countries; and examined the impacts of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on the fisheries and tourism industries.

She holds a Ph.D. in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of California, Berkeley.

Shanthi Nataraj joined IZA as a Research Fellow in July 2020.