09/14/2026
Great research conversations are an important part of graduate education.
Last week Thursday, we were delighted to welcome Jheelum Sarkar of American University to present her job market paper, “Telework Exposure and Female Labor Supply in Emerging Economies: Evidence from India.”
Jheelum’s research examines whether access to telework-compatible jobs can increase women’s labor force participation in India, where commuting constraints, household responsibilities, and social norms can create substantial barriers to paid employment. Her results suggest that greater exposure to telework opportunities can meaningfully increase female labor supply, with particularly interesting differences across household and demographic groups.
The paper also features some innovative empirical work: Jheelum constructs occupation-level measures of telework potential from India’s national occupation descriptions and combines them with local digital infrastructure to measure telework exposure.
Thank you, Jheelum, for sharing your work with our faculty and students and for a lively discussion!
Experiences like these give our M.S. in students an opportunity to engage directly with current applied . You can learn more about our Master’s program in Economic Analytics by tapping on the link below:
https://www.towson.edu/cbe/departments/economics/economic-analytics-masters/
