Anja Tolonen
Assistant Professor of Economics, Barnard College
Anja Tolonen is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Barnard College, Columbia University. She works on economic development and gender. One strand focuses on health and gender, including menstruation and school absenteeism, stigma around menstruation, and household health investment and knowledge. Another strand focuses on the local welfare effects of natural resource extraction in Africa, including effects on women’s employment, gender norms, health and criminality. Her research methods include quasi-experimental analysis and randomized control trials, and she often uses large datasets. She has peer-reviewed publications in World Development, The Economic Journal and Ambio. At Barnard, she teaches Empirical Development Economics and Econometrics. She is an affiliated faculty at the Center for Development Economics and Policy at Columbia University. Prof. Tolonen is an external research member at Oxford Center for Analysis of Resource Rich Economies (University of Oxford), and UNESCO and The World Bank has funded her research. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from University of Gothenburg in 2015 and has been a visiting researcher at University of Oxford and University of California at Berkeley. During the academic year 2017-2018 she will be on an academic sabbatical at Princeton University (fall 2017) and New York University (spring 2018).
Working Group Affiliations