Sriya Iyer FREcon is Professor of Economics and Social Science at the University of Cambridge and a Professorial Fellow of St. Catharine’s College. She read for a BA (Hons) in Economics in St Stephen’s College Delhi and for a BA (MA Cantab), MPhil and PhD from the University of Cambridge. She serves as a Member of Council of the Royal Economic Society and a Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), London, the Institute for Labour (IZA), Bonn, and the Global Labour Organisation (GLO). She is Deputy Director of The Keynes Fund for Applied Economics and an Academic Editor for PLOS ONE.

Her research is in the fields of development economics, economics of religion, demography and education. She has published three books on Demography and Religion in India (Oxford University Press 2002), The Economics of Religion in India (Harvard University Press 2018) and Advances in the Economics of Religion (Palgrave Macmillan 2019); as well as journal articles including in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Journal of Political Economy, Journal of Economic Literature, Review of Economics and Statistics and the Journal of Development Economics.

For her research she has been awarded a Population Council Social Science Research Fellowship, a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, and grants from the John Templeton Foundation, the Isaac Newton Trust, the Cambridge-INET Institute, The Keynes Fund and the Templeton Religion Trust. She leads the Social Consequences of Religions Initiative Strand 3 on Religions and Economic Development (2024-2034). In 2014 she was awarded a University of Cambridge Pilkington Prize for Teaching Excellence and in 2025 she was made a Founding Fellow of the Royal Economic Society.

She joined IZA as a Research Fellow in February 2012.