Hitanshu Pandit, Ph.D.
Visiting Assistant Professor of Economics, Bates College · Visiting Research Fellow, Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy, Northeastern University
I am an applied economist working on labor, health and urban questions. I build measures of work from large data that was never collected for research, such as job postings, worker profiles, mobile-device visits, card transactions and Medicaid claims, and I use them to answer questions that cities, state agencies and firms are already asking.
Academic CV (PDF)· Resume (PDF)· Job market paper· GitHub· Email
Appointments
Bates College, Visiting Assistant Professor of Economics2026–present
Northeastern University, Visiting Research Fellow, Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy2026–present
Northeastern University, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, School of Public Policy and Urban Affairs2023–2026
Research Affiliate: Global Labor Organization; NULab and GAP Initiative, Northeastern University
Education
University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Ph.D. in Economics2023
Central University of Kerala, M.A. in Economics2018
SGTB Khalsa College, University of Delhi, B.Sc. (Honors) in Mathematics2014
Publications and Papers in Revision
“Simply Can't Wait: Evaluating the Effect of Food Industry Minimum Wage Increase in California on Local Labor Markets.” Applied Economics Letters, 2026.
“Behavioral Responses to Time-Varying Congestion Pricing: A Natural Experiment from NYC.” Applied Economics Letters, 2026.
“Where the Rubber Meets the Road: Examining Efficiency and Equity in Designing Summer Youth Employment Programs” (with Alicia Sasser Modestino, Mindy Marks and Hanna Hoover). Revise and resubmit, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.
“Who Pays for Higher Wages? Evidence from Consumer Spending after California's Fast-Food Minimum Wage Increase.” Revise and resubmit, Southern Economic Journal.
Working Papers
“Splitting the Stack: Generative AI and the Cross-Country Division of Technical Work” (job market paper).
“Who Supplies the AI Frontier? Education, Training and Mobility of the Workforce of Frontier AI Firms” (with Mahima Nambiar).
“Where Do Opportunity Zone Jobs Go? A Network Analysis of Employment Flows in Place-Based Tax Policy” (with Kishan Narayan). Presented at the 48th APPAM Fall Research Conference, 2026.
“City Limits: The Relationship Between Employment and Minimum Wage Using Mobile-Device Locations.”
“Estimating the Cost Savings of Tiered Care Coordination and High-Fidelity Wraparound: Evidence from North Carolina” (with Jeremy W. Bray and Zubab Moid).
Applied and Policy Work
- City of Boston. Research partnership on the SuccessLink summer jobs program, which serves more than 10,000 young people a year. I wrote 12 analytical memos for the director of the City's Worker Empowerment Cabinet, built on linked state education records, applications and employers' hiring decisions.
- North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services. Evaluation of a statewide Medicaid care-coordination program using fee-for-service claims (more than 50 million records); emergency department spending fell about 20 percent.
- New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development. Invited talk, 2026.
Data and Methods
- Data: job postings (LinkUp), worker profiles (People Data Labs), mobile-device locations, card transactions, Medicaid claims, LEHD/LODES, ACS, CPS; pipelines on more than 100 million monthly observations.
- Methods: difference-in-differences and event studies, regression discontinuity, instrumental variables, randomized trials, gravity models; topic models, sentence embeddings and classification for text.
- Tools: Python, SQL, R, Stata, SAS, Git, LaTeX, high-performance computing.
Media Coverage and Writing
- Research on California's fast-food minimum wage covered by Inc. and Phys.org.
- California fast-food minimum wage paper cited in a VoxEU column by Vitor Melo, David Neumark, Liam Sigaud and Gary A. Wagner (2026).
- Research on New York City congestion pricing covered by Social Storytellers Collective.
- Op-ed, “IndiGo's Dominance: Fragile Skies, Fare Caps, and India's Aviation Market,” New India Abroad.
Peer Review
Referee for the Journal of Development Economics (6 reports), Economics of Education Review (9), Southern Economic Journal, Scientific Reports (3), Humanities and Social Sciences Communications and Research in Labor Economics; reviewer for the APPAM Equity Scholarship Program and the AcademyHealth Annual Research Meeting.
Invited Talks
2026: Thapar University (Future of Work); Wayne State University; New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development; St. Olaf College; Network Science Institute, Northeastern University. Earlier: C2C Policy Research Seminar and Policy Seminar, Northeastern University; National Institute of Technology, Surathkal.
Grants and Fellowships
Faculty Development Fund Grant, Bates College (2026); Institute for Humane Studies Grant (2025); Arnold Ventures Professional Development Grant (2024); Kathleen Price and Joseph M. Bryan Fellowship, UNC Greensboro (2022–2023).
Teaching
- Bates College: Statistics (ECON 250), Urban Economics (ECON 348), Data Science for Economists (ECON 368)
- UNC Greensboro: Principles of Microeconomics; Economics and Business Statistics
- IIM Udaipur: Microeconomics and Macroeconomics for MBA
Conference presentations, service and references are in the full CV.