Abhijit Banerjee
Abhijit Banerjee, Ph.D., Harvard University; Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology; is a professor of economics at MIT. With Esther Duflo, he has conducted randomized evaluations of remedial and computer assisted education in India. He has also assessed reforms of informal schools in tribal areas in India, working closely with a local NGO.
Lori Beaman
Lori A. Beaman is currently a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health
Policy Research at UC Berkeley. She will join the Department of
Economics at Northwestern University as an Assistant Professor in
January 2009. Lori's primary fields of interest are development and
labor economics, with a focus on how social networks facilitate
information transmission. Her recent work has also evaluated the
impact of a political affirmative action program on gender bias in
rural India. Her PhD is in Economics from Yale University.
Esther Duflo
Esther Duflo, Ph.D., MIT, Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is a professor of economics at MIT. Her work includes randomized evaluations of policies to promote agricultural productivity in Kenya. She has also examined the impact of women and lower-caste members of village councils in India.
Pascaline Dupas
Pascaline Dupas, Ph.D., EHESS-PSE (France), is an Assistant Professor in the Economics Department at Dartmouth College. Her research focuses on health and education in developing countries, notably in Kenya. She founded TAMTAM Africa, a non-profit organization which provides insecticide treated nets to pregnant women through rural prenatal clinics.
Rachel Glennerster
Rachel Glennerster is Executive Director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab. She has worked on health policy, financial market reform, debt relief and other issues at the IMF, the Harvard Institute for International Development, and the UK Treasury.
Justine Hastings
Justine Hastings is an assistant professor of economics at Yale University. Her work focuses on decision making behavior in low-income and minority communities, how these decisions impact education attainment, savings, and consumption. She is interested in how government interventions and regulated markets can be designed to maximize opportunities for the disadvantaged. Areas of study include public schooling, school choice and academic achievement in urban school districts, and social security privatization, savings, and investment in
Mexico.
Julian Jamison
Julian Jamison is Research Assistant Professor of Psychology at USC and is Research Director of the Experimental Social Science Lab at UC Berkeley. His PhD is in economics from MIT. His main interests are in human decision-making, especially with regard to health and well-being. He has employed theoretical, laboratory, and multiple field studies to improve understanding of these behaviors as well as outcomes around the world. This work has taken him to Bolivia, India, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, and Vanuatu.
Dean Karlan
President and Founder of IPA, is Assistant Professor of Economics at Yale University; Research Fellow at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT; and an Affiliate of Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD). His research focuses on microeconomic issues of public policies and poverty. He studies the effectiveness of particular policies to fight poverty or the relevance of economic theories of individual decision-making. Much of his work uses behavioral economics insights and approaches to examine economic and policy issues relevant in developing countries as well as in domestic charitable fundraising and political participation.
Jeffrey Kling
Jeffrey Kling is Deputy Director and Senior Fellow in the Economic Studies program at the Brookings Institution. Over the past ten years he has led interdisciplinary teams of researchers in studies of housing vouchers and the effects of moving out of high-poverty neighborhoods, based on extensive data collection about experiences of families in HUD's Moving To Opportunity randomized voucher experiment. He is also currently examining unemployment insurance, Medicare prescription drug insurance, and other aspects of social insurance in the U.S.
Michael Kremer
Michael Kremer, Ph.D., is the Gates Professor of Developing Societies in the Department of Economics at Harvard University and Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and a Presidential Faculty Fellowship, and was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. Kremer's recent research examines education and health in developing countries, immigration, and globalization. He founded and was the first executive director of WorldTeach, a non-profit organization which places 360 volunteer teachers annually in developing countries.
John List
John List, Ph.D., is Professor, Department of Economics at the University of Chicago. His research has used field experimental methods to provide insights into the valuation of nonmarketed goods and services, public good provisioning, behavioral anomalies, charitable giving, auction theory, and the role of the market in the development of rationality.
David McKenzie
David McKenzie is a Senior Economist at the World Bank. 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,
looking at Tongans moving to New Zealand, and experiments on the return to capital in microenterprises in Sri Lanka and Mexico.
Edward Miguel
Edward Miguel is an associate professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley. His work focuses on the provision and the impact of public goods to the poor in Sub-Saharan Africa, notably in Kenya and Tanzania. He has conducted a randomized evaluation of a deworming program in Kenya and of a nutrition supplement program aimed at pre-primary school children in India.
Sendhil Mullainathan
Sendhil Mullainathan is Professor of Economics at Harvard University. He is a co-founder of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT, Research Associate/Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau for Economic Research (NBER), on the board of directors of the Bureau for Research in Economic Analysis and Development (BREAD). His areas of research are development economics, behavioral economics, corporate finance, and applied microeconomics. He has studied the setting of wages, executive compensation, racial discrimination in the labor market, public policy and social structure in developing nations, and behavioral economics of the poor.
Eldar Shafir
Eldar Shafir is 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 received his Ph.D. in Cognitive Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1988, and was a Postdoctoral Scholar at Stanford University. His interests are in experimental studies of decision making and their implications for economics, rationality, and policy, and decision making in the context of poverty. He has received the Hillel Einhorn New Investigator Award and the Chase Memorial Award.
Jonathan Zinman
Jonathan Zinman is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College. He has worked previously at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and as a strategic analyst and loan fund manager for the Massachusetts Community Development Finance Corporation. His research focuses on consumer and entrepreneurial choice with respect to financial decisions. He has worked with financial institutions in South Africa and the Philippines to improve pricing, products, marketing, and risk assessment strategies, and to test whether such initiatives are profitable for firms and beneficial to their clients.
Microfinance Initiative
Microfinance institutions provide access to financial services for millions of poor people around the world.
Yet many remain unreached. Countless potential clients live in the “backyards” of microfinance institutions, yet they do not or can not receive the services provided by the new banks. Why?
