Sonia Bhalotra is Professor of Economics at the University of Warwick. She obtained an MPhil and DPhil from Oxford and a BSc Hons from Delhi. She is a labour economist by training with research expertise in health (including mental health), gender and political economy.

Her research has contributed to understanding skill creation, the long run benefits of early life health interventions, maternal and child health including maternal depression and adolescent mental health, the gender pay gap, fertility, abortion, IVF, domestic violence, workplace sexual harassment and women’s inheritance rights. Her research is set, inter alia, in India, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, America, the UK, Denmark, Sweden and the US.

She is Principal Investigator on an Advanced Grant from the European Research Council on the economics of violence against women, Co-investigator CAGE ESRC Research Centre Warwick and co-lead of the wellbeing (and mental health and gender) theme; Co-Investigator ESRC Research Centre on Micro-Social Change at ISER Essex and leader of the Families theme; and PI or Co-I or named collaborator on a series of Gates Foundation and NIH funded projects on maternal depression and child development. She was recently Co-Investigator ESRC Project on Human Rights, Big Data and Technology at the Human Rights Centre Essex .

Sonia is Fellow of the he Institute for Fiscal Studies London (2022-), the International Economic Association, the UK Academy of Social Sciences, the Centre for Economic Policy Research London, IEPS Brazil, SFI Denmark, and MLIV Chile.

She is on the Council of the Royal Economic Society, on the Women in Economics Committee of the European Economic Association, Visiting Professor at the University of Rotterdam under a gender-diversity initiative, Senior Editor Oxford Research Encyclopaedia Economics and Finance, and Associate Editor at the Economic Journal.

Sonia has acted as Keynote or Panelist in both academic and policy conferences on about 40 occasions in the last five years. She earlier served on the Evidence Panel of the Early Intervention Foundation and the International Advisory Board of Lancet Women. She has been a Visiting Professor at Oxford, Essen and Gothenburg. She has served on Scientific Committees at the WHO, UNICEF, ILO, British Academy, the European Society of Population Economics Council, the International Review Panel of the Danish Research Council and several ESRC committees, and she was a CROP Research Fellow at Bergen.

She has or has had collaborations with academics in Politics, Psychology, Philosophy, Medicine, Law.

Her AER March 2020 paper with Victoria Baranov, Pietro Biroli and Joanna Maselko was covered in AER Research Highlights: https://www.aeaweb.org/research/maternal-depression-cognitive-behavioral-therapy. And summarised in this Video: https://youtu.be/gFbFi7LTWaI

Her daughter Sameera made this video of her 2013 paper on cognitive development and infectious disease:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kP374sjvEFM

The IGC/LSE created this video of her paper showing that economic growth improves under women legislators: https://www.theigc.org/multimedia/are-women-politicians-good-for-economic-growth/

Sonia has written several blogs, some of which can be found here:
https://www.iser.essex.ac.uk/blog?author=14
https://www.hrbdt.ac.uk/domestic-violence-during-covid-19-related-lockdown/
http://www.ideasforindia.in/search.html
https://voxdev.org/users/srbhalotra
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cage/publications/globalperspectives/
https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cage/publications/