Researchers

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.

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.

Margaret McConnell is an Assistant Professor of Global Health Economics at the Harvard School of Public Health.  She completed her PhD from the California Institute of Technology in 2009.  Her graduate and post graduate studies have focused on understanding what motivates individual decisions about savings and health.  She designs field experiments that test models from behavioral economics, providing insight into whether policies designed to encourage investments in health are effective and why.   Since 2009 Dr.McConnell has been a Principal Investigator with Innovations for Poverty Action where she oversees research on health and financial decision-making in Africa and Latin America.  Dr. McConnell’s work has been referenced in major publications including Slate magazine, the Wall Street Journal and Kiplinger’s.