Research Affiliates

Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee was educated at the University of Calcutta, Jawaharlal Nehru University and Harvard University, where he received his Ph.D in 1988. He is currently the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2003 he founded the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), along with Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan and remains one of the directors of the lab. In 2009 J-PAL won the BBVA Foundation "Frontier of Knowledge" award in the development cooperation category. Banerjee is a past president of the Bureau for the Research in the Economic Analysis of Development, a Research Associate of the NBER, a CEPR research fellow, International Research Fellow of the Kiel Institute, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society and has been a Guggenheim Fellow and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow. He received the Infosys Prize 2009 in Social Sciences and Economics. His areas of research are development economics and economic theory. He has authored two books as well as a large number of articles and is the editor of a third book. He finished his first documentary film, "The name of the disease" in 2006.

Chris Blattman is an Assistant Professor of Political Science and Economics at Yale University, where he teaches on African development, applied econometrics, and the political economy of warfare. He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of California at Berkeley, and a Master’s in Public Administration and International Development (MPA/ID) from the Harvard Kennedy School. Dr. Blattman’s research examines the causes and consequences of civil war, post-conflict recovery, poverty alleviation through firms and micro-enterprises, as well as youth employment in Africa–especially among troubled or unstable populations, like ex-combatants, street youth, and refugees. Much of his work employs field experiments and natural experiments in conflict and post-conflict regions. He has ongoing studies in Liberia, Uganda, and Ethiopia.

Pascaline Dupas is an Assistant Professor in the Economics Department at Stanford University. Dupas' areas of research are applied microeconomics and development economics. She is currently conducting field experiments in health, education, and microfinance.

Xavier Giné is a Senior Economist in the Finance and Private Sector Development Team of the Development Research Group at the World Bank. Since joining the World Bank as a Young Economist in 2002, his research has focused on access to financial services and rural financial markets. In recent papers, he investigated the macroeconomic effects of a credit liberalization; the relationship between formal and informal sources of credit in rural credit markets; indigenous interlinked credit contracts in the fishing industry and the impact of weather insurance. Prior to joining the Bank he was a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer at the Economic Growth Center at Yale University. He holds an MA and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago.

Justine Hastings is an Associate Professor of Economics at Yale University. She is a graduate of the University of California at Davis and received her Ph.D in 2001 from the University of California at Berkeley. She is a Resident Fellow at Yale University's Institution for Social and Policy Studies and a Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Justine's research focuses on decision making behavior in low-income and minority communities, and the impact of these behaviors on educational attainment, savings, and consumption. Other research investigates how government interventions and regulated markets can be designed to maximize opportunities for the disadvantaged.

Dean Karlan is Professor of Economics at Yale University and President and Founder of IPA. He is a graduate of the University of Chicago's Harris Graduate School of Public Policy and Graduate School of Business and received his Ph.D in 2002 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), and the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, Dean is also a research fellow at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab and the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development. His research focuses on microeconomic issues of public policies and poverty. Much of his work uses behavioral economics insights and approaches to examine economic and policy issues relevant to developing countries as well as to domestic charitable fundraising and political participation.

Leigh L. Linden is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Texas at Austin with a joint appointment in the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs. Working in the fields of development economics and economics of education, he explores the role of education in the microeconomic foundations of poverty. He focuses on understanding both the education production process and the family decision problems that determine the allocation of educational opportunities within the household.

David McKenzie is a Senior Economist at the Development Research Group, The World Bank, where he was a core team member on the 2007 World Development Report. He is a graduate of the University of Auckland and received his Ph.D in 2001 from Yale University. Formerly an Assistant Professor of Economics at Stanford University, David is a research fellow at the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration, the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development, and the Institute for the Study of Labor, an Associate Editor of the Journal of Development Economics, as well as serving on the Editorial Board of the World Bank Economic Review. His work focuses on the barriers to microenterprise growth, and on the impact of migration on developing countries. He has conducted the first randomized evaluation of migration (of Tongans moving to New Zealand) and experiments on the return to capital in microenterprises in Sri Lanka and Mexico.

Mushfiq Mobarak is a development economist with interests in public finance (environmental and political economy) issues. He joined the Yale School of Management faculty in 2007 with previous work experience at the World Bank, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and at the International Monetary Fund. He has several ongoing field research projects in Bangladesh and Brazil, and his current research interests include projects on water management and hydropower in Brazil, and field experiments exploring ways to induce people in developing countries to adopt technologies or behaviors that are likely to be welfare improving. He is currently advising several PhD economics candidates working on development issues, and he won the 2006 Most Outstanding Faculty Advisor Award at the University of Colorado. He teaches an elective course focused on the challenges to doing for-profit or non-profit business in developing countries. He also leads MBA international experience trips to developing countries.

Karthik Muralidharan is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of California at San Diego. He is a graduate of Harvard University and Cambridge University and received his Ph.D in 2007 from Harvard University. His research focuses on improving education and health in developing countries. Karthik was the recipient of the Spencer Foundation Exemplary Dissertation Award and is a Consultant at The World Bank. His areas of research include Development Economics and human Capital, health and education in developing countries. His research includes randomized evaluations of performance-pay for teachers, the impact of contract teachers, and the impact of cash grants to schools on student learning outcomes in India. Current projects include studying the impact of school choice programs in India, and the impact of teacher certification, across the board salary increases for teachers, and continuous teacher training programs in Indonesia.

Jonathan Robinson is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received his Ph.D in 2007 from Princeton University. Jonathan is also a member of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT and an Affiliate at the Center of Evaluation for Global Action at the University of California, Berkeley. Jonathan's research focuses on economic development, with an emphasis on field experiments and data collection, and much of his work in these areas has been done in Kenya.

Eldar Shafir is the William Stewart Tod Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs at the Department of Psychology and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. He is a graduate of Brown University and received his Ph.D. in Cognitive Science in 1988 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Shafir is a research fellow at the TIAA-CREF Institute, a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, and a member of the Academic Advisory Board at Behavioral Finance Forum as well as of the Behavioral Economics Roundtable of the Russell Sage Foundation. He is a Faculty Associate at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University, and co-director of Ideas42, a social science R&D lab. He has held visiting positions at The University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, The Kennedy School of Government, The Institute for Advanced Studies of The Hebrew University, Pompeu Fabra University, and The Russell Sage Foundation, among others. A recipient of the Hillel Einhorn New Investigator Award and the Chase Memorial Award, his research focuses on experimental studies of decision-making in situations of conflict and uncertainty. His recent work has focused on behavioral analyses of decision-making in the context of poverty and, more generally, on the application of behavioral research to policy.

Christopher Udry is the Henry J. Heinz, II Professor of Economics at Yale University. He is a development economist whose research focuses on rural economic activity in sub-Saharan Africa. He has conducted extensive field research in West Africa on technological change in agriculture, the use of financial markets, asset accumulation and gift exchange to cope with risk, gender relations and the structure of household economies, property rights and a variety of other aspects of rural economic organization. He spent two years as a secondary school teacher in northern Ghana, and has been a visiting scholar at Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria and at the University of Ghana at Legon. At Yale, Udry has directed the Economic Growth Center and served as the Chair of the Department of Economics. He teaches graduate courses on development economics, and undergraduate courses on economic development in Africa. Course syllabi and a description of some of his current research can be found at his website: http://www.econ.yale.edu/~cru2 .