Rate My Professor Neha Agarwal

Dr. Neha Agarwal serves as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of Otago, located within the Otago Business School in Dunedin, New Zealand. She completed her PhD in Economics at the University of California, Riverside in 2018 and holds an MA in Economics from the University of Delhi. Agarwal's academic interests center on applied microeconomics, with a focus on development economics, labor economics, health economics, gender disparities, and labor markets, particularly in developing countries. Her research explores critical issues such as the persistence of disability, the impact of son preference on maternal health across cultures and countries, vocational and apprenticeship training programs, household labor supply decisions influenced by married men's earnings, and the motivations behind charitable giving and volunteering, including whether warm-glow givers are also warm-glow volunteers.

In her teaching role, Agarwal delivers courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, including ECON271 Intermediate Microeconomic Theory, ECON351 Special Topic: Economics of Households and Wellbeing, and ECON406 Labour and Population Economics. She has published in respected academic journals and contributed to scholarly outputs archived in the University of Otago's OUR Archive. Key publications include 'Path Dependence in Disability' in the Journal of African Economies (2022, with Hans-Peter Kohler), 'Son Preference and Maternal Health: A Cross-Cultural and Cross-Country Analysis' in Economic Development and Cultural Change (with Annamaria Milazzo), 'Are warm-glow givers also warm-glow volunteers?' forthcoming (2025, with Stephen Knowles), 'To Work or Not to Work? Married Men's Earnings and the Labor Supply of Other Household Members' forthcoming (2025, with David Fielding and Arpita Mukherjee), and the book chapter 'New evidence on vocational and apprenticeship training programs in developing countries' (2025, with Subha Mani). Additional works encompass 'Caste Differences in Child Growth: Disentangling Endowment and Investment Effects' (2024) and 'Political Commitment, Policy Consequences, and Moral Beliefs: Survey Evidence on the Minimum Wage' (2022). Her scholarship has accumulated over 190 citations on Google Scholar and supports graduate supervision in economics.