Pamela Torola
PhD Candidate in Economics, Yale University
I am on the 2026–27 economics job market.
Fields: Development Economics, International Trade
I study how micro-level forces inside farms and households — the need to feed one’s family, land inheritance norms, and how women divide their time between home and market work — shape productivity and structural transformation.
My job market paper studies the transition from subsistence to market-oriented farming. I show how caloric needs and fixed selling costs distort crop choices, how development induces farms to enter output markets and specialize, and how this transition contributed to agricultural productivity growth in India between 1971 and 2006.
Before my PhD, I was a predoctoral fellow to Professor William Nordhaus at Yale (2019–2021) and a research assistant at the Medical Practice Evaluation Center (Harvard / Massachusetts General Hospital), a health policy research group that builds simulation models to evaluate clinical and public health decisions. I hold an M.Phil. and M.A. in Economics from Yale (2024) and a B.S. in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Yale (2018). My graduate work is supported by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and was supported by a Sylff Fellowship at the Yale Economic Growth Center.
Research
Job market paper
Working papers
- From Rural Fields to Urban Kitchens: Structural Change and the Decline of Women's Work in India EGC Discussion Paper No. 1111, Yale University, December 2024
- The Gendered Employment Impacts of Smartphones: Evidence from Mexico Draft, December 2025
Work in progress
- Inheritance, Farm Size, and Agricultural Productivity
- For-Profit Colleges and the Sources of Undermatching
Publications
- Estimating the Effect of Maternal Viral Load on Perinatal and Postnatal HIV Transmission: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis The Lancet, 406(10501), 349–357, 2025
- Measuring the US Employment Situation Using Online Panels: The Yale Labor Survey Journal of Economic and Social Measurement, 46(1–2), 1–22, 2021
- Novel Microsimulation Model of Tobacco Use Behaviours and Outcomes: Calibration and Validation in a US Population BMJ Open, 10(5), e032579, 2020
Data
- Harmonized ARIS-REDS panel (1971–2006) The first harmonization of all four rounds of the ARIS-REDS rural household surveys (1971, 1981, 1999, 2006; roughly 240 villages in 17 Indian states) into a single dataset linking crop production, land allocation, food consumption, and output-market participation at the household level over 35 years.
Teaching
- ECON 117: Introduction to Data Analysis and Econometrics
Teaching Fellow (Prof. John Eric Humphries), Spring 2025, Yale College - ECON 117: Introduction to Data Analysis and Econometrics
Teaching Fellow (Prof. John Eric Humphries), Fall 2023, Yale College
Fellowships & Awards
- National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, 2021–2026
- Sylff Fellowship (Ryoichi Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund), Economic Growth Center, Yale University, 2024–2025
- Cowles Foundation Labor and Public Economics Program, data-acquisition grant ($43,500, with Serena Goldberg and Ryan Haygood), 2023–2028
- Belknap Prize (Senior Thesis), Yale University, 2018
- Prix Montaigne (French), Yale University, 2018
Contact
Department of Economics, Yale University
New Haven, CT 06520-8268
pamela.torola@yale.edu ·
ORCID