Dr. Leonard Wantchekon is a Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University, as well as Associated Faculty in Economics. A scholar with diverse interests, Dr. Wantchekon has made substantive and methodological contributions to the fields of political economy, economic history and development economics, and has also contributed significantly to the literatures on clientelism and state capture, resource curse and democratization. He has implemented pioneering studies on political institutions and governance, using field experiments with real politicians competing in real elections to investigate the effects of broad-based policy messages and deliberative campaign strategies on voting behavior and election outcomes. His current work along these lines applies the methodology of institutional experiments to study candidate selection in local elections, bureaucratic governance and the politics of education policies. Professor Wantchekon’s academic initiatives and research projects have been covered by major international media outlets such as Financial Times, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Jeune Afrique, BBC, Voice of America and Radio France International, among others. His scholarship is shaped in part by his experiences as a left-wing pro-democracy student activist under a repressive military regime in his native country of Benin from 1976 to 1987. He reflects on this experience in his autobiography Rêver-a-Contre Courant (Dreaming Against the Current, Harmattan, 2012), which was reviewed by Professor Nicolas Van De Walle for Foreign Affairs in 2013. Professor Wantchekon is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Econometric Society and a member of the Executive Committee of the International Economic Association. He has also served as Secretary of the American Political Science Association and on the Executive Committee of the Afrobarometer Network. Professor Wantchekon is the Founder and President of the African School of Economics, which opened in Benin in 2014. He previously served as professor at New York University and at Yale University, and holds a PhD in Economics from Northwestern University. For his full profile, please visit the IMF website for a Finance & Development article entitled “Ground Breaker.”