About

Rajeev Dehejia received his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 1997. He has held faculty positions at the Department of Economics and The Fletcher School at Tufts University, as well as at Columbia University’s Department of Economics and the School of International and Public Affairs. He has also held visiting positions at Harvard, Princeton, and the London School of Economics. His research spans econometrics, development economics, labor economics, and public economics, with a focus on empirical microeconomic policy research. His interests include econometric methods for program evaluation, financial development and growth, financial incentives and fertility decisions, moral hazard and automobile insurance, religion and consumption insurance, and the causes and consequences of child labor. Dehejia's articles have been published in numerous reputable journals, and he is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Research Fellow at the Institut zur Zukunft der Arbeit (IZA), and a Research Network Fellow at CESifo. He has served as an editor for several academic journals, including the Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, the Journal of Human Resources, and the Journal of the American Statistical Association.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Economics
• Demographic economics
• Statistics
• Econometrics
• Sociology
• Labour economics
• Mathematics
• Demography
• Psychology
• Geography

Selected publications

• A new approach to the economic theory of fertility behavior

  The Economic Journal · 65 citations

  • Sociology
  • Economics
  • Demographic economics

  Using a compiled data set of 441 censuses and surveys from between 1787 and 2015, representing 103 countries and 51.4 million mothers, we find that: (i) the effect of fertility on labour supply is typically indistinguishable from zero at low levels of development and large and negative at higher levels of development, (ii) the negative gradient is stable across historical and contemporary data, and (iii) the results are robust to identification strategies, model specification, and data construction and scaling. Our results are consistent with changes in the sectoral and occupational structure of female jobs and a standard labour–leisure model.

  DOI

• Malleable Minds: The Effects of STEM- vs. Humanities-Focused Curricula

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-11-01

  reportOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Judges Judging Judges: Partisanship and Politics in the Federal Circuit Courts of Appeals

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Judges Judging Judges: Polarization in the U.S. Courts of Appeals

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-09-01

  reportOpen accessSenior author

  We examine how politicization and polarization influence judicial review within U.S. Federal appellate courts.Analyzing over 400,000 cases from 1985 to 2020, we find that judges' political alignment or misalignment with trial judges increasingly affect their decisions, particularly in the last two decades.This trend is significant in precedential cases: panels of Democratic judges are 6.9 percentage points more likely to reverse Republican trial judges compared to Democratic ones, whereas Republican panels are 3.6 percentage points less likely to reverse fellow Republican judges.This effect persists across ideological and non-ideological cases and even among judges appointed before 2000.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Why Do Households Leave School Value Added on the Table? The Roles of Information and Preferences

  American Economic Review · 2023 · 31 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Economics
  • Demographic economics

  Romanian households could choose schools with one standard deviation worth of additional value added. Why do households leave value added “on the table”? We study two possibilities: (i) information and (ii) preferences for other school traits. In an experiment, we inform randomly selected households about schools' value added. These households choose schools with up to 0.2 standard deviations of additional value added. We then estimate a discrete choice model and show that households have preferences for a variety of school traits. As a result, fully correcting households' beliefs would eliminate at most a quarter of the value added that households leave unexploited. (JEL D12, D83, I21, I28)

  PublisherDOI

• Why do households leave school value added “on the table”? The roles of information and preferences

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Financial Development and Micro-Entrepreneurship

  Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis · 2021-08-26 · 17 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Does financial development facilitate micro-entrepreneurship? Using randomized surveys of over 1 million Indian households and bank-branch location as predetermined by government policy, we find that access to finance shifts workers from informal micro-entrepreneurship into formal employment. Financial access reduces the likelihood of being self-employed but benefits micro-enterprises with employees, as well as formal firms. Using data on 400,000 firms, we find that in districts with more banks, firms have higher loans, productivity, employment, and wages than firms in less banked districts. This evidence suggests a labor-market mechanism by which financial development facilitates growth: by shifting workers from unproductive micro-entrepreneurship into productive employment.

  PublisherDOI

• Working conditions and factory survival: Evidence from better factories Cambodia

  Review of Development Economics · 2020 · 15 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Economics
  • Econometrics

  Abstract A large and growing literature has identified several conditions, including exporting, that contribute to plant survival. A prevailing sentiment suggests that anti‐sweatshop activity against plants in developing countries adds to the risk of closure, making survival more difficult by imposing external constraints that may interfere with optimizing behavior. Using a relatively new plant‐level panel data set from Cambodia, this paper applies survival analysis to estimate the relationship between changes in working conditions and plant closure. The results find little, if any, evidence that improving working conditions increases the probability of closure. In fact, some evidence suggests that improvements in standards relating to compensation are positively correlated with the probability of plant survival.

  PublisherDOI

• The Effect of Fertility on Mothers' Labour Supply over the Last Two Centuries

  2020-08-04 · 1 citations

  datasetOpen access

  Replication programs and data for "The Effect of Fertility on Mothers' Labour Supply over the Last Two Centuries"

  PublisherDOI

• The Effect of Fertility on Mothers’ Labor Supply over the Last Two Centuries

  The Economic Journal · 2020-08-25

  preprintOpen access

  Abstract Using a compiled data set of 441 censuses and surveys from between 1787 and 2015, representing 103 countries and 51.4 million mothers, we find that: (i) the effect of fertility on labour supply is typically indistinguishable from zero at low levels of development and large and negative at higher levels of development, (ii) the negative gradient is stable across historical and contemporary data, and (iii) the results are robust to identification strategies, model specification, and data construction and scaling. Our results are consistent with changes in the sectoral and occupational structure of female jobs and a standard labour–leisure model.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Cristian Pop-Eleches

  87 shared

• Erzo F.P. Luttmer

  IZA - Institute of Labor Economics

  70 shared

• Thomas DeLeire

  Georgetown University

  59 shared

• Raymond Robertson

  58 shared

• Alma Cohen

  Harvard University Press

  51 shared

• Miguel Urquiola

  48 shared

• Robert Ainsworth

  47 shared

• Drusilla K. Brown

  47 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  Harvard University

  1997