Sanjay Jain
Senior Fellow in Economics
Associate Head (Graduate studies)
Sanjay Jain is Senior Fellow in the Department of Economics at Oxford. He has previously served on the Economics faculty at Cambridge University, the University of Virginia, as an assistant professor of Economics and International Affairs at George Washington University in Washington DC, and as a lecturer at Princeton University. He is a Research Fellow at IZA (Institute of Labor Economics), and has previously been a Visiting Senior Fellow at STICERD in the London School of Economics. He has served as a frequent consultant to the World Bank and for WIDER (World Institute for Development Economics Research) Helsinki.
Sanjay's research interests are in development economics, political economy, and applied microeconomic theory. Current research projects include the political economy of economic policy reform, (including a recent paper in the European Journal of Political Economy 2026), and the operation of informal credit markets in developing countries.
More recently, he has been working, with several co-authors, on healthcare and service delivery. This began with covid-related research - specifically, on developing a novel methodology, based on robust optimization, that provides a structured way for policymakers to break the trade-off between accuracy and cost in diagnostic testing, while allowing for incomplete or noisy data. (Management Science 2024. Previously: another working paper on medRxiv and an earlier paper in Nature Medicine). It continues with a pilot (funded by Gates Foundation India) on innovative forms of healthcare delivery through the public health system in Tamil Nadu state in India.
He received his PhD in Economics at Princeton University, an MA in Economics at Johns Hopkins University, and a BA (Honours) in Economics from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University.
His Google Scholar Page is available at this link
