Sarah Akyena is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Economics at Georgia State University, Andrew Young School of Policy Studies.
Her research interests include labor, public finance, education economics, poverty, and inequality.
Her work broadly examines the sources of disparities in economic outcomes and behavioral responses to public policies. One area of her research focuses on how differences across individuals and households contribute toward inequalities in the labor market and education outcomes. In another work, she explores the implications and unintended consequences of public policies that address inequalities in the labor market and human capital achievement. Currently, she is working on her job market paper, which investigates whether the effort of policymakers to reduce welfare dependency by using wage subsidies to promote employment has an unintended effect on job match quality.
She is a Data Strategy Fellow at Achieve Atlanta. As a fellow, she is involved in projects on the effectiveness of policies that encourage college enrollment and graduation, especially among students from low-income households. Previously, she worked as a Research Associate at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta (Atlanta-FED). At the Atlanta-FED, she was involved in projects on racial disparities in the labor market, the labor supply and welfare impacts of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Job Acts, and the implications and tax burden of the growing electric vehicle adoption. She received an MSc in Mathematical Science from the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa, and a BA in Economics and Mathematics from the University of Ghana. She is one of the recipients of the 2024 Association of Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) Equity and Inclusion Student Fellowship, the National Tax Association (NTA) Equity and Inclusion Travel Fellowship, and the 2018 Mastercard Foundation Scholar Award at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences (AIMS) South Africa.