Jay Sarkar
Jay completed his Ph.D. under the supervision of Associate Professor Thomas Osang in 2006 and joined the Department of Economics at Louisiana Tech in Fall 2006 as an Assistant Professor. He then moved to the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in 2010 where he remains today.
Jay's research interest is broad. His primary areas of research are health economics, macroeconomics, and more recently, behavioral economics. He has published in journals such as Health Economics, Economic Inquiry, Journal of Corporate Finance, Journal of Macroeconomics, and Journal of Money, Credit and Banking. In 2019, Jay received the 2019 best paper prize in health economics awarded by the Australian Health Economics Society for her paper “What does attending early childhood program mean for child health in India?” published in Health Economics in 2017.
SMU has given me one of the most memorable 6 years of my life.
Everyday brought a ‘first’ – meeting people and making friends of various nationalities, savoring the first Texas-size double cheese burger, sitting in tests that allowed almost unlimited time, visiting stalls at the annual ‘one-stop shop’, and of course the first snowfall of my life in 2002 that brought SMU to a halt. I fondly remember the all-nighters we used to pull before the qualifying exams in the carrel downstairs. The Friday happy hours at the local pub were special, filled with delightful conversations with friends and professors over chilled beer and nachos.
I have been lucky to have been trained by some great professors who inspired me to become an academic. I am especially grateful to my PhD supervisor and great mentor, Prof. Thomas Osang, who has been a constant source of motivation and support in my PhD journey. I still draw on the fond memories and the lessons from the fantastic professors and support staff at SMU.— Jay Sarkar, Queensland University of Technology