Pawandeep Kaur

Doctoral Student
Chair of Development Economics / CeMIS, Prof. Dr. Sebastian Vollmer

Pawandeep is a doctoral researcher in the Faculty of Business and Economics at the Chair of Development Economics, University of Göttingen, and a recipient of the CeMIS PhD Fellowship, which supports scholars from marginalised communities committed to social change. Her research interests broadly lie in Development Economics and Applied Microeconomics, with a particular focus on education, inequality, health and political economy.

Her current projects examine the distributional effects of affirmative action in higher education at the sub-caste (jati) level, the role of international migration policies in shaping marriage markets in India, and the impact of climate change and agricultural practices such as stubble burning on health outcomes.

Before her PhD, she worked as a Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB) and as an Academic Associate at the Indian Institute of Management Indore (IIMI) on projects related to caste disparities in learning outcomes and the Right to Education Act. She has also worked on research initiatives at IIT Kanpur, BHU Varanasi, and Panjab University, focusing on women’s safety, decision-making, and the dynamics of handloom industry clusters. She holds an M.A. in Economics from Panjab University, Chandigarh. She identifies as a Sikh woman from Punjab, a group underrepresented in academia. Beyond research, she is passionate about photography, reflective writing, and wide reading.

Here's a link to her website.