Hi, I'm Sangita Vyas.

I'm a development economist and demographer, and an Assistant Professor in Economics at CUNY Hunter College.

About

My research focuses on the interrelationships among health, the environment, and social inequality in India. I'm particularly interested in the causes and consequences of poor air quality and poor sanitation. I'm trained in economic demography, applied microeconomics, and econometrics.

TEDx Talk

In 2015, I spoke at TEDx WalledCity in New Delhi on why so many rural Indians defecate in the open. The video has over 2.5 million views.

Latest Research

Long-term population projections: Scenarios of low or rebounding fertility

We show that any stable, long-run size of the world population would persistently depend on when an increase towards replacement fertility begins. Without such an increase, the 400-year span when more than 2 billion people were alive would be a brief spike in history. This paper has been published in PLOS One.

Do Fertility Preferences in Early Adulthood Predict Later Average Fertility Outcomes of the Same Cohort?: Pritchett (1994) Revisited with Cohort Data

In this paper, we update Pritchett (1994) by examining the relationship between ideal fertility in early adulthood and completed fertility for the same cohort of women in later adulthood. We find that the prior result replicates: The relationship between fertility preferences and completed cohort fertility is, if anything, even stronger in our data. This paper is forthcoming in Economic Letters.

Latest Media

Cooking with gas, not wood | The Hindu

Cooking with gas, not wood | The Hindu

Using cleaner fuels such as LPG is essential to reduce rural air pollution and improve health. What can policymakers do to achieve exclusive use of clean fuels in rural India?