Anjali Adukia

Institution: University of Chicago

Anjali Adukia is an assistant professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and the College. In her work, she is interested in understanding how to reduce inequalities such that children from historically disadvantaged backgrounds have equal opportunities to fully develop their potential.  Her research is focused on understanding factors that motivate and shape behavior, preferences, attitudes, and educational decision-making, with a particular focus on early-life influences.  She examines how the provision of basic needs—such as safety, health, justice, and representation—can increase school participation and improve child outcomes in developing contexts.

Adukia completed her doctoral degree at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education, with an academic focus on the economics of education. Her work has been funded from organizations such as the William T. Grant Foundation, the National Academy of Education, the Spencer Foundation, and the Institute of Education Sciences.  Her dissertation won awards from the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM)Association for Education Finance and Policy (AEFP), and the Comparative and International Education Society (CIES). Adukia received recognition for her teaching from the University of Chicago Feminist Forum.  She completed her masters of education degrees in international education policy and higher education (administration, planning, and social policy) from Harvard University and her bachelor of science degree in molecular and integrative physiology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  She is a faculty research fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research and a faculty affiliate of the University of Chicago Education Lab.  She is on the editorial boards of Education Finance and Policy and Journal of Research on Educational Effectiveness.

EdWorkingPapers

School districts historically approached conflict-resolution from a zero-sum perspective: suspend students seen as disruptive and potentially harm them, or avoid suspensions and harm their classmates. Restorative practices (RP) -- focused on reparation and shared ownership of disciplinary justice -- are designed to avoid this trade-off by addressing undesirable behavior without imparting harm. This study examines Chicago Public Schools' adoption of RP. We identify decreased suspensions, improved school climate, and find no evidence of increased classroom disruption. We estimate a 19% decrease in arrests, including for violent offenses, with reduced arrests outside of school, providing evidence that RP substantively changed behavior.

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Books shape how children learn about society and norms, in part through representation of different characters. We introduce new artificial intelligence methods for systematically converting images into data and apply them, along with text analysis methods, to measure the representation of skin color, race, gender, and age in award-winning children’s books widely read in homes, classrooms, and libraries over the last century. We find that more characters with darker skin color appear over time, but the most influential books persistently depict characters with lighter skin color, on average, than other books, even after conditioning on race; we also find that children are depicted with lighter skin than adults on average. Relative to their growing share of the U.S. population, Black and Latinx people are underrepresented in these same books, while White males are overrepresented. Over time, females are increasingly present but appear less often in text than in images, suggesting greater symbolic inclusion in pictures than substantive inclusion in stories. We then present analysis of the supply of, and demand for, books with different levels of representation to better understand the economic behavior that may contribute to these patterns. On the demand side, we show that people consume books that center their own identities. On the supply side, we document higher prices for books that center non-dominant social identities and fewer copies of these books in libraries that serve predominantly White communities. Lastly, we show that the types of children's books purchased in a neighborhood are related to local political beliefs.

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Anjali Adukia.

Programs that provide lower-skill employment are a popular anti-poverty strategy in developing countries, with India's employment-guarantee program (MGNREGA) employing adults in 23% of Indian households.  A potential concern is that guaranteeing lower-skill employment opportunities may discourage investment in human capital and long-run income growth.  Using large-scale administrative data and household survey data, I estimate precise spillover impacts on education that reject substantive declines in children's education from the government's rollout of MGNREGA.  I estimate that these small negative impacts are inexpensive to counteract, particularly compared to MGNREGA expenditures on rural employment and poverty alleviation.

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