Anja K Benshaul-Tolonen

Anja Benshaul-Tolonen is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Barnard College, Columbia University since 2015. She works on economic development, environmental economics and economics of gender. One strand focuses on health and gender, including menstruation and school absenteeism, stigma around menstruation, and household health investment and knowledge. Another strand focuses on the local welfare effects of natural resource extraction in Africa, including effects on women’s employment and empowerment, health and criminality. Her research methods include quasi-experimental analysis and randomized control trials, and she often uses large datasets. She has peer-reviewed publications in World Development and The Economic Journal. She is an affiliated faculty at the Center for Development Economics and Policy at Columbia University and an external research member at Oxford Center for Analysis of Resource Rich Economies (University of Oxford). She received her Ph.D. in Economics from University of Gothenburg in 2015 and has been a visiting researcher at University of Oxford, University of California at Berkeley, Princeton University and New York University.