Urbashee P
- Research Program Mentor
PhD at Northeastern University
Expertise
Economics, Public Policy, Mathematics, Statistics, Writing, Research
Bio
During her time as an economics PhD student, Urbashee researched the effect of U.S. high-skilled immigration policy reform on firm performance and the labor market. She also worked with her advisor, Dr. Alicia Sasser Modestino, on evaluating the effect of private sector summer jobs on high students’ academic outcomes for the Boston Mayor’s Office of Workforce Development. Prior to joining Northeastern, Urbashee worked as an economics researcher at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and at a public policy think tank in Washington, DC. Upon graduation, Urbashee joined Analysis Group’s NY office as an Associate where she currently applying her empirical research skills in the dynamic world of economic and litigation consulting. Besides research, Urbashee enjoys learning classical Indian music, soccer, taking long walks in nature, and exploring the NY food scene.Project ideas
Ever wondered how a summer internship can help students?
We can work together to design a research project that looks at how summer internships affect high school students. Do they experience increased aspirations to pursue a certain career? Are they more motivated to do well at school? Do they get better grades? This project will offer you the chance to learn how to design a survey, collect data, conduct interviews, analyze data, and improve your academic writing style. I am open to working on this topic, or any other economics topic(s) of your choosing! For a previous research project, I worked with my advisor on a similar topic. Here is what we found: Recently, policymakers and researchers have explored how time spent outside of the classroom, including early work experience, can affect educational outcomes and reduce inequality across racial and socioeconomic groups. Although research has demonstrated that high-intensity work-based learning programs improve high school graduation and post-secondary enrollment, little is known about the effects of stand-alone private sector employment experiences on student outcomes. We study a unique program that brokers employer-paid summer job internships for Boston public school youth across 150 private sector firms in a variety of industries such as healthcare, finance, biotechnology, higher education, and real estate. Using data from school administrative records, we employ both fixed effects and matching models to estimate the impact of receiving a private sector placement on both high-school and post-secondary outcomes. Both models show similar impacts on outcomes that can be measured repeatedly over time with significant improvements in high school attendance and course failures associated with having had a private sector placement during the summer. Furthermore, we use our matching model to explore outcomes that occur only once, finding that private sector job experience increases standardized test taking as well as the likelihood of on-time high school graduation and college enrollment. These results suggest that private sector employers have an important role to play in the “ecosystem” of summer jobs, beyond government sponsored programs, to support experiences that help prepare youth for both educational and career pathways into adulthood.