Rate My Professor Dhanushka Peru

Dhanushka Peru serves as an Instructional Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Houston, within the Business & Economics faculty. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Houston, completed in August 2020, with a dissertation titled "Essays on Migration and Labor Markets." Specializing in Development and Labor Economics, Peru previously served as Assistant Professor of Economics and Business at Berkshire Community College, where he developed and supervised a business internship program and received a nomination for the TRIO Faculty Award in 2022. During his doctoral program, he worked as a Teaching Fellow and Teaching Assistant at the University of Houston, teaching Intermediate Macroeconomics, Principles of Macroeconomics, Microeconomics Theory II (Game Theory), Behavioral Economics, Intermediate Microeconomics, and Introduction to Data Analysis. From 2012 to 2015, he was an Instructor at the Center for Banking Studies, Central Bank of Sri Lanka, delivering courses on Financial Institutions and Regulations, Principles of Microeconomics and Macroeconomics, Fundamentals of Business, Business Mathematics, and Personal Finance.

Peru's academic interests include Applied Microeconomics, Labor Economics, Development Economics, and Health Economics, focusing on government restrictions on labor migration and wage inequality trends. His job market paper, "Women's Labor Market Opportunities and Fertility Decisions: Evidence from Sri Lanka" (under review), analyzes the effects of Sri Lanka's 2013 migration restrictions on women's fertility using panel data from the Demographic and Health Survey in a regression discontinuity in time framework. Other works include the working paper "Trends in Wage Inequality in Sri Lanka," which uses Labor Force Survey data to examine supply and demand shifts from 1996 to 2014, and "The Effects of Chronic Disease on Household Labor Supply," a work in progress on Chronic Kidney Disease in Sri Lanka. At the University of Houston, he teaches Introduction to Econometrics, Data Management with Economic Applications, Introduction to Economic Data Analysis, Economics of Money and Banking, and Capital Market Economics. He was awarded the Department Teaching Award by the University of Houston Department of Economics in 2019 for excellence in mentoring and teaching.