About

Aashish Mehta is a development economist specializing in the fields of development economics, labor economics, and political economy. He trained in economics and energy policy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he completed a PhD in Agricultural and Applied Economics. Prior to joining the University of California, Santa Barbara, he worked at the Asian Development Bank, supporting electricity sector reforms and studying the implications of structural transformation for employment and education policy across the region. His research examines the economics of development and change, including globalization, industrialization, employment, education, and inequality. He works closely with collaborators across disciplines on institutional aspects of economic development, such as public services provision, corruption, gender-based violence, colorism, and commodity price management. Recognized for his teaching, he received UCSB’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2017. His academic contributions include research associate roles at the Broom Center for Demography, affiliated faculty at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at UC Berkeley, and senior research fellow at the Angelo King Institute for Economic and Business Studies in Manila.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Economics
• Demographic economics
• Mathematics education
• Development economics
• Natural resource economics
• Agricultural economics
• Medicine
• Finance
• Law
• Psychology
• Market economy
• Medical education
• Business
• Economic growth
• Public administration
• Labour economics

Selected publications

• College Major Restrictions and Student Stratification

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Is anything left of the debate about the sources of growth in East Asia 30 years later? A critical survey

  Journal of Evolutionary Economics · 2025-03-06 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• College Major Restrictions and Student Stratification

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The Estimation of Production Functions with Monetary Values

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Education and the evolution of comparative advantage

  Structural Change and Economic Dynamics · 2024-05-21 · 2 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  We analyze the evolution of comparative advantage in 1,240 products from 49 low- and middle-income countries between 1995 and 2015. We show that countries with high education levels were more successful in developing comparative advantage in products unrelated to those they already exported. This effect is strongest for non-core products. In contrast, these countries did not develop comparative advantage in products that were intrinsically complex or education-intensive. These results are robust to corrections for specification errors, for institutional, infrastructure, and FDI-related factors, for regional specialization patterns, for key shifts in global trade rules, and for each economy's degree of industrial dynamism prior to 1995. These findings suggest that the key role of education when seeking to develop new industries is to help a country learn to manage unfamiliar challenges, and so overcome path dependence.

  PublisherDOI

• Effectiveness of Public Spending: The Case of Rice Subsidies in the Philippines

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024 · 12 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Economics
  • Agricultural economics
  PublisherDOI

• College Major Restrictions and Student Stratification

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2024-12-01 · 5 citations

  reportOpen accessSenior author

  Underrepresented minority (URM) college students have been steadily earning degrees in relatively less lucrative fields of study since the mid-1990s.A decomposition reveals that this widening gap is principally explained by rising stratification at public research universities, many of which increasingly prevent students with poor introductory grades from declaring popular majors.We investigate these major restriction policies by constructing a novel 50-year dataset covering four public research universities' student transcripts and employing a staggered difference-in-difference design around the implementation of 25 GPA-based restrictions.Restrictions disproportionately filter out less-prepared students with fewer pre-college academic opportunities, decreasing average URM enrollment shares by 20 percent.They do not measurably improve allocative efficiency across majors, departments' wage value-added, or filtered students' educational attainment.Using first-term course enrollments to identify students who intend to earn restricted majors, we find that major restrictions disproportionately lead URM students toward less lucrative majors, explaining nearly all growth in within-institution ethnic stratification since the 1990s.

  PublisherDOI

• Review of: "Factors contributing to labour unrest at the garment factories in Bangladesh: A cross-sectional study"

  2023-08-17

  peer-reviewOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Potential competing interests: No potential competing interests to

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Will Studying Economics Make You Rich? A Regression Discontinuity Analysis of the Returns to College Major

  American Economic Journal Applied Economics · 2022 · 70 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Economics
  • Labour economics
  • Demographic economics

  We investigate the wage return to studying economics by leveraging a policy that prevented students with low introductory grades from declaring a major. Students who barely met the grade point average threshold to major in economics earned $22,000 (46 percent) higher annual early-career wages than they would have with their second-choice majors. Access to the economics major shifts students' preferences toward business/finance careers, and about half of the wage return is explained by economics majors working in higher-paying industries. The causal return to majoring in economics is very similar to observational earnings differences in nationally representative data. (JEL A22, I26, J24, J31)

  PublisherDOI

• College Major Restrictions and Student Stratification

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2021 · 24 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Demographic economics
  • Mathematics education
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Jesús Felipe

  41 shared

• Pilipinas Quising

  24 shared

• Shiela Camingue

  19 shared

• Rana Hasan

  University of Basrah

  15 shared

• Shikha Jha

  12 shared

• Héctor J. Villarreal

  Tecnológico de Monterrey

  6 shared

• Jean‐Paul Chavas

  University of Wisconsin–Madison

  6 shared

• Alison Brysk

  5 shared

Labs

• Global-e Journal LabPI

Awards & honors

• UCSB’s Distinguished Teaching Award (2017)