From UC Irvine to Manchester
UC Irvine Ph.D. student Jyotsana Kala has long been drawn to economics for its focus on how people make choices under constraints.
“Economics is the science of decision-making under scarce resources. Given my indecisive personality, it offered a kind of natural refuge when I first discovered it,” she says. “Over the years, I came to see it as more than a subject; it's a way of thinking, almost a worldview.”
Having completed her bachelor’s and master’s in economics in India at the University of Delhi and Madras School of Economics, respectively, she knew she wanted to dive deeper.
“UCI felt like a natural home. The faculty here are exceptional, and Irvine itself offers a rare blend of calm, beauty, and energy that keeps me inspired,” she says.
Since arriving in 2020, Kala has thrived, earning recognition as a Sheen T. Kassouf Endowed Fellow for research excellence. This year, she co-received the Kathy Alberti Prize for her promise as a future professor and won the Charles A. Lave Outstanding Paper Prize for her research on Uber's algorithmic wage discrimination. She’s served as a pedagogical fellow for four years, training incoming cohorts of TAs across the social sciences and business school while also being voted Best TA in a graduate course. And, among one of her proudest Anteater moments, she got to represent UCI on the women's intercollegiate table tennis team at the NCTTA championships – an experience she says, “lives in a different part of my heart.”
Kala is graduating in June and come fall, she’ll be joining the Department of Economics at the University of Manchester as a lecturer/assistant professor.
“It is a big, exciting step and I genuinely can't wait. Teaching at UCI, including to first-year Ph.D. students, gave me real confidence in the classroom,” she says. “And the research portfolio I built here feels like a strong foundation to build toward tenure. UCI prepared me well, in more ways than I can fully articulate.”
Below, she reflects on her award-winning research, the faculty who’ve influenced her intellectual pursuits, and how lessons learned in table tennis have translated to academic success.
Q: Tell us a bit about your research. What problem will your findings help solve? Where can your work be found if someone wanted to learn more?
A: My research sits at the intersection of labor economics and macroeconomic theory, with a focus on market power. One thread looks at how AI is reshaping the balance of market power between platforms and gig workers: are workers being paid fairly when an algorithm decides their wages? Using a novel dataset on Uber drivers, I provide the first empirical evidence of algorithmic wage discrimination and find that it widens earnings inequality among drivers, while simultaneously making markets more efficient for passengers. That tension has real implications for how we regulate digital labor platforms and protect workers in the gig economy.
My other work examines how minimum wages affect employment and earnings, with a particular focus on whether these effects vary by labor market competition, and race. I also have ongoing work on fair workweek laws and the ripple effects of mass layoffs on housing markets — questions around low-wage earners that sit at the heart of some of the most active debates in economics today.
Since my work spans labor markets and the macroeconomic consequences of market concentration, it's a mix of theoretical and empirical — some papers close to policy, others more foundational. If any of it sounds interesting, everything is on my website. I have some exciting publications coming up and I'd love for readers to take a look!
Q: What are some of your proudest accomplishments while at UCI?
A: A few things stand out. Receiving the Sheen T. Kassouf Endowed Fellowship was significant. It is highly competitive with only one student selected from the department each year. Serving as a Pedagogical Fellow for four years, training incoming cohorts of TAs across the social sciences and business school, was deeply rewarding in a different way. Being voted unanimously by students as the Best TA in a graduate course genuinely meant a lot. But honestly, my proudest moment has been representing UCI on the women's intercollegiate table tennis team at the NCTTA championships. That one lives in a different part of my heart.
Q: Who have been your faculty mentors while here, and what impact have they had on your graduate career?
A: Guillaume Rocheteau and David Neumark have been the two biggest intellectual influences on my graduate career. Guillaume's macroeconomics coursework deepened my interest in search-theoretic models and the role of frictions in shaping market power. In parallel, working with David trained me in causal inference and grounded my thinking in what the data actually shows. Guillaume encouraged me to think about why rational agents behave as they do; David motivated me to test whether they actually do. Together, their mentorship anchored my research approach, integrating theoretical rigor with empirical validation. My job market paper is, in many ways, a synthesis of those two impulses, and I wouldn't have found that synthesis without them.
I'd also like to mention Michael Choi and Damon Clark, whose elective courses were genuinely the most intellectually alive I experienced at UCI, and whose feedback on my work was always sharp, honest, and exactly what I needed at the moment. In many ways, they've shaped the kind of mentor I hope to become.
Q: How did table tennis factor into your Ph.D. experience? Give us some background.
A: Training competitively in table tennis taught me something that helped me a lot in my Ph.D.: how to fail, reset, and keep going. In sports, training never translates one-to-one into results; yet the only way to win is to keep at it, and to develop something like a goldfish memory for failure, letting it go the moment it's over. I found myself applying that same logic to research. A rejected paper, an intractable model, a dataset that refuses to cooperate stopped feeling like verdicts and started feeling like part of the process.
Table tennis also taught me how to trust myself. Every shot requires full commitment and there's no room for second-guessing once the ball is in motion. You either back your instincts or you hesitate, and hesitation loses the point. Research demands something similar. You have to trust the hours you've put in, commit to a direction, and see it through — especially in a Ph.D., which is a marathon, not a sprint. The training doesn't always show up when you want it to, but it's there!
Q: Any other tidbits you’d like to share?
A: One thing I wish I'd invested in earlier in my Ph.D. is writing. It is easy to underestimate now, especially with AI tools becoming a fixture in academic work, but writing is thinking. Learning to present my work clearly, whether in seminars, papers, or conversations with collaborators outside my field, didn't just make me a better communicator. It made me a better researcher. Clarity of expression and clarity of thought, I came to realize, are the same thing.
And to anyone hitting a wall somewhere in their Ph.D., which will happen sooner or later, here is what I'd say: if you already knew how to do research, you wouldn't be in a Ph.D. program. You're here to learn. Give it time and give yourself credit for showing up.