Manisha Shah

Manisha Shah is an American economist and academic who serves as Chancellor's Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a development economist whose primary research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of applied microeconomics, health, and gender.

Education Shah earned her Bachelor of Arts in Economics and Development Studies from University of California at Berkeley in 1995. , Founding Director of the Global Lab for Research in Action from 2019 to 2023 , and Franklin D. Gilliam, Jr. Chair in Social Justice from 2021 to 2023.

Shah returned to UC Berkeley in 2023 when she was appointed Chancellor's Professor in 2023.

Shah is a faculty research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and maintains affiliations with leading research organizations , including the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) , the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) , and the California Center for Population Research (CCPR).

Research and scholarly work Her research has been supported by major institutions, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, World Bank, National Science Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, National Institutes of Health, J-PAL, and Innovations for Poverty Action. , international development, global health, and policy evaluation, with a central focus on how public policies and interventions can improve health outcomes, education, human capital formation, and economic wellbeing in low- and middle-income settings. Her work combines rigorous empirical methods including randomized controlled trials (RCTs), impact evaluations, and quasi‑experimental designs to provide causal evidence on the effects of social programs and policies.

Global Health

Intimate partner violence (IPV) and sexual behaviors Her research explores interventions that target female adolescents and their male partners to reduce IPV in East Africa. Her work has focused on involving males in the endeavor to decrease global IPV. She has written a paper which documents insights from the economics literature on causal and cost-effective methods to decrease IPV in LMICs.

Pandemic effects on violence and well-being She documents how strict COVID-19 lockdowns correlated with increased reports of domestic violence (shadow pandemic) and how containment measures affected women's mental health and food security in India.

Health system responses and provider behaviors/biases Shah's work in health economics investigates how health system characteristics and provider practices shape service quality and uptake in low‑income countries. In large RCTs across Tanzania, Burkina Faso, and Pakistan, she evaluates strategies to reduce bias among health care providers in family planning, improving the quality of reproductive services. She examines disparities in reproductive health care quality, showing persistent gaps in care for adolescents in sub-Saharan Africa.

Her recent work evaluates strategies to reduce bias among health care providers in family planning, improving the quality of reproductive services. She examines disparities in reproductive health care quality, showing persistent gaps in care for adolescents in sub-Saharan Africa.

Child health and sanitation infrastructure A significant strand of Shah's research explores the impact of sanitation and infrastructure improvements on health and nutrition outcomes. In a multi‑country randomized field experiment, she and collaborators documented how increases in village sanitation coverage driven by behavior change and facility access led to measurable improvements in child height and health outcomes, with large gains observed once coverage passed defined thresholds.

Human capital, education, and labor Shah studies how economic opportunities, public works programs, and early‑life conditions affect schooling and skill formation among children and adolescents.

She has investigated how aggregate employment programs, such as India's National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS), impacted economic activity and output, showing that these programs can increase aggregate economic indicators while generating heterogeneous regional effects. She has also examined how this rural workfare program in India (NREGS) influenced adolescent labor versus schooling decisions, providing evidence on how expanding labor opportunities alters human capital investment.

Her research also addresses the long‑term effects of early life conditions, such as weather shocks and livelihoods, on later educational outcomes and income trajectories.

Other research Shah is one of the leading economists who has studied the economics of sex work in both developing countries and the United States. Her study Risky Business: The Market for Unprotected Sex with Paul Gertler and Stefano Bertozzi was published in 2005 in the Journal of Political Economy. The study focused on how beauty and willingness to have unprotected sex affected the bargaining power and earnings of sex workers in Mexico.

Since then Shah has written papers on impacts of regulating sex markets showing with Scott Cunningham that decriminalization of indoor sex work in Rhode Island decreased STI transmission and reported rape offenses. In another seminar paper Shah and co-authors Lisa Cameron and Jennifer Seager show that criminalizing brothels in Indonesia increases the spread of STIs.

Honors and awards

Chancellor's Professorship, University of California, Berkeley (2023) Dean's Teaching Award, University of Melbourne (2008) Keynote Speaker, Asian Meeting of the Econometric Society (2022) Keynote Speaker, Korean Economic Association (2022) Keynote Speaker, Latin American Health Economics Network Workshop (2024)

Selected publications