Dr. Kehinde Ajayi is an economist in the World Bank’s Africa Region Gender Innovation Lab, where she leads the Youth Employment thematic area. Her work centers on gender, employment, skills, and financial inclusion. She was previously an Assistant Professor of Economics at Boston University and a Faculty Research Fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research. She holds a PhD in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley and a BA in Economics from Stanford University.
Dr. James Cust is an economist working in the Office of the Chief Economist, Africa Region at the World Bank. Here he is co-leading a new flagship study on Africa’s Resource Future, examining the potential for natural resource wealth to drive Africa’s economic transformation under pressure from climate change, demographic trends and digitisation.
He also manages the Think Africa Partnership, a regional initiative which seeks to elevate the quality of economic debate and decision making in Africa by supporting key participants in that process, namely: chief government economic advisors, think tanks and scholars. As part of this work the team has established a peer-learning network of presidential economic advisors across 30 African countries.
Prior to his current position, James was Director of Research and Data at the Natural Resource Governance Institute and the founding staff member of the Natural Resource Charter. Both of these initiatives sought to support better outcomes for lower income countries from exploitation of their natural wealth. This involved working directly with governments, academics, and civil society organizations to promote better policymaking and better public debate around the choices countries face when facing resource dependence. James’ research examines the role of government and governance in harnessing natural resources for growth and poverty reduction, in the context of climate pressures. This work covers the choices countries face around wealth in both renewable (especially forests) and non-renewables (oil, gas and minerals). His work addresses policy-relevant empirical questions, utilizing large-scale spatial data and causal identification. He has recently completed work on the Presource Curse – where some countries are shown to experience expectation booms and growth disappointments even before production begins, on Institutions and the location of oil exploration examining how much weak governance can deter investment in lower income countries, and on Stranded Nations examining challenges faced by fossilfuel rich nations in the face of global decarbonization. He has also completed studies on the local impacts of resource wealth, deforestation dynamics, and Dutch disease. James holds a DPhil (PhD) in Economics from the University of Oxford, an MSc with distinction from Oxford, and a first-class BA Hons from Cambridge. He is an external Research Associate of the Oxford
Centre for the Analysis of Resource Rich Economies (OxCarre) at the Department of Economics in Oxford. You can find his research online at: www.jamescust.com and he tweets at @jimcust.
Dr. Bocar Ba is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and a research affiliate at Duke University’s Economics Department. In July 2020, Bocar will start as an Assistant Professor in Economics at UC Irvine. Previously Bocar was a Postdoctoral Associate at Duke University’s Economics Department. Bocar received his Ph.D. in Public Policy from The University of Chicago. His studies include the economics of crime, law and economics, and applied econometrics. He uses untapped administrative data to understand police accountability. Some of the data that Bocar has compiled with the Invisible Institute and Roman Rivera can be found here.
Dr. David Deming is a Professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is the Faculty Director of the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy, and a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research focuses broadly on the economics of skill development, education and labor markets. He is currently serving as a coeditor at the AEJ: Applied, and is a Principal Investigator (along with Raj Chetty and John Friedman) at the CLIMB Initiative, an organization that seeks to study and improve the role of higher education in social mobility. Professor Deming recently won the David N. Kershaw Prize, which is awarded biannually to scholars who have made distinguished contributions to the field of public policy and management under the age of 40.
Dr. Pascaline Dupas is a Professor of Economics at Stanford University. She is a development economist seeking to identify interventions and policies that can help reduce global poverty. Her ongoing research include studies of education policy in Ghana, family planning policy in Burkina Faso, digital credit regulation in Malawi, fiscal capacity in Cote d'Ivoire, and government subsidized health insurance in India, among others. Dupas joined the Stanford faculty in 2011, after spending two years on the faculty at Dartmouth College and three years at UCLA. She is on the executive committee of the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (JPAL), on the board of directors of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), and a Research Associate at the National Bureau for Economic Research (NBER). She is a National Science Foundation CAREER award winner, a Fellow of the Econometric Society, a former Sloan Fellow, and a current Guggenheim Fellow. Dupas studied philosophy and economics as an undergraduate student at the Ecole Normale Superieure (Ulm) in Paris, France. She obtained a PhD in Economics from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris, France) in 2006. She normally lives in Palo Alto, California, with her husband Kudzai and children Naomi (9) and Paul (5), but the entire family has relocated to Paris for the academic year 2019/2020. Dupas is visiting the Paris School of Economics when she is not doing field work.
Dr. Jessica Goldberg is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland, where she created and serves as the faculty director of a program for undergraduate students called Promoting Achievement and Diversity in Economics (PADE). Dr. Goldberg is a development economist whose research interests include rural labor markets, strategies and obstacles to financial inclusion, and the role of social networks in economic decisions. She is currently working on field experiments about credit and savings in Uganda and Zambia, women's participation as providers and consumers of mobile money services in Bangladesh, and the role of social networks in outreach to treat communicable disease in India.
Dr. Goldberg is a faculty affiliate of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (JPAL) and the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), and a faculty research fellow in the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). She is a Co-Editor of the Journal of Human Resources and an Associate Editor of the Review of Economics and Statistics and the Journal of Development Economics.
Dr. Ian McCarthy is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Emory University and a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Indiana University in 2008 and joined Emory University in 2014. Before coming to Emory, Ian was a director in the Economic Consulting practice of FTI Consulting in Dallas, TX and the director of health economics for the Baylor Health Care System (now Baylor Scott & White Health).
Ian’s research interests are in the fields of health economics, industrial organization, and econometrics. His primary research focuses on the effects of institutions, policies, and competition on health care delivery, where his most recent work specifically examines the effects of the physician-hospital integration on hospital pricing, productive efficiency, and physician behaviors. Ian has extensive experience working with health care data, including health insurance claims, and he has competed successfully for external funding from several sources, including the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and the National Institute for Health Care Management.
Dr. Priya Mukherjee is a development economist, and is currently an assistant professor of economics at William & Mary. Her interests lie in the economics of education and political economy, and she utilizes both field experiments and non-experimental methods in her work. Her current projects are based in India, Indonesia, and Bangladesh, and include studies on the impact of democratization and decentralization, the impact of social identity on education outcomes, and on understanding education markets, and improving state capacity. She received her PhD in Economics from Cornell University in 2015. She also holds a Master of Science in Economics from the London School of Economics in the UK, and a Bachelor in Mathematics (with honors) from the University of Delhi, in India.
Dr. Gina C. Pieters is an assistant instructional professor at the University of Chicago Department of Economics and an honorary non-visiting Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge - Center for Alternative Finance (CCAF). Her research agenda examines decentralized virtual currencies and their impact on international economies, focusing on their use and implication as a globally traded alternative to national currencies or assets incorporating topics such as exchange rates, capital controls, and the global financial and monetary system (including Central Bank Digital Currency) especially in relation to the decentralization that comes from distributed ledger technology. She is currently on the board of directors of the International Trade and Finance Association and has won multiple teaching awards. She is on Twitter as @ProfPieters.
Dr. Nishith Prakash joined the University of Connecticut after completing his doctorate at the University of Houston, Texas and working as a post-doctoral research associate at Cornell University from July 2010 till December 2011. He previously held visiting Assistant Professor Positions at Ohio University and Dartmouth College and Visiting Scholar at Columbia University, Yale University, MIT, and Boston University. He will be a Fellow with the Women and Public Policy Program (WAPPP) at Harvard Kennedy School during 2019-2020.
He is also a Research Fellow at the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration (CReAM) based at University College London, The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Bonn, HiCN Households in Conflict Network, and Member of Insights on Immigration and Development (INSIDE-SPAIN).
Professor Prakash’s primary research interests include development, political economy, public policy, and economics of education. One line of his work focuses on understanding the effects of affirmative action policies in India on labor market outcomes, child labor, and poverty. His other work has examined topics such as the returns to English-language skills, effects of crime on economic growth, and effect of politician quality on economic outcomes in India. His recent works include interventions to reduce gender gaps in education using large randomized control trials (RCTs) in Zambia and evaluation of various government policies in India.
Through his academic pursuit, he has focused on the relationship between government policies and economic development and harnessed rigorous empirical evidence to study the impact of policies and institutions in enabling inclusive growth. He has experience in conducting surveys, running large-scale randomized control trials (RCTs) in developing countries and working with large-scale observational and administrative data sets.
Professor Prakash’s research has been published in the top economics journal, including the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics and Journal of Development Economics. His works has also been published in interdisciplinary journals including World Development, Feminist Economics, and Journal of Human Rights.
Professor Prakash’s research has been covered in The Economist, World Bank Development Impact Blog, World Economic Forum, The Atlantic, The Hindu, The Times of India, The Financial Time, The Statesman, The Economic Times and other national and international newspaper.
Dr. Tristan Reed is an economist in the Development Economics Research Group of the World Bank. He joined the World Bank Group at the International Finance Corporation, after starting his career as a consultant with McKinsey and Company in their Lagos, Nigeria office. He has worked on a number of flagship analytic reports for the Bank, and supported policy dialogue related to infrastructure lending operations in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. His research focuses on the industrial organization and political economy of low and lower-middle income countries, and has been supported by the International Growth Centre (IGC) and the National Bureau for Economic Research (NBER). Tristan holds a PhD in economics from Harvard University and a BA summa cum laude in economics from UCLA.
Dr. Renard Sexton is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Emory University. He studies conflict and development with a focus on local level violence and interventions intended to curb violence. His research covers insurgency, terrorism, social conflict around natural resources, and police crackdowns; he has regional expertise in Afghanistan, Southeast Asia and Andean Latin America. His research has been published in top scholarly journals, including the American Political Science Review and American Journal of Political Science. His policy pieces and commentary have been published by The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, International Crisis Group, Foreign Policy and other outlets. Before joining Emory, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University and Economics of Conflict fellow at the International Crisis Group.
Dr. Rhonda Vonshay Sharpe is the founder and president of the Women’s Institute for Science, Equity and Race, the first think tank to focus solely on the social, economic, cultural and political well-being of women of color. She is the co-editor of the Review of Black Political Economy and served as the past President of the National Economic Association. In 2018, she was named 1 of 25 Black Scholars You Should Know by thebestschools.org.
Rhonda’s research focuses on three areas: gender and racial inequality; the diversity of STEM; and the demography of higher education. Her recent publications include: “We’ve to Build the Pipeline: What’s the Problem and What’s Next?”; “Who Attends For-Profit Institutions? The Enrollment Landscape” (with William (Sandy) Darity, Jr. and Steve Stokes) in For-Profit Universities: The Shifting Landscape of Marketized Higher Education; “Poverty in Global Perspective” (with Kendal Swanson) in The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies; and “HBCUs: Creating a Scientific Workforce Outta 15 Cents” in Setting a New Agenda for Student Engagement and Retention in Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Other publications include a co-edited volume Black Female Undergraduates on Campus: Successes and Challenges (with Crystal Chambers) (Diversity in Higher Education series); “What Type of Institutions are Successful at Replicating the Diversity of the Full-Time Student Population in the Pool of Bachelor’s Degrees Awarded for STEM-Disciplines” in Beyond Stock and Stories of Folk Tales: African Americans and the Pipeline to the Professoriate and Evidence Based Examination of STEM Fields (Diversity in Higher Education series); and “America’s Future Demands a Diverse and Competitive STEM Workforce” in Jobs Rebuild America: Putting Urban America Back to Work.
Her research has been featured on the PBS News Hour, in the New York Times, and on the Kerri Miller Show. She is a recurring guest on the BBC’s Business Matters. Rhonda serves on the boards of the International Association of Feminist Economists and Diversifying and Decolonizing Economics.
She has served on the faculty at Barnard College, Bennett College, Bucknell University, Columbia University, Duke University, and the University of Vermont. She is the co-founder (with Sandy Darity) of the Diversity Initiative for Tenure in Economics (DITE) for which she served as the Associate Director from 2008 to 2014. She was the 2008-09 Institute of Higher Education Law & Governance Fellow at the University of Houston Law Center. She is the co-recipient of the 2004 Rhonda Williams Prize from the International Association for Feminist Economists. She was a Carolina Minority Postdoctoral Fellow in the economics department at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Rhonda completed her undergraduate studies in Mathematics at North Carolina Wesleyan College. She holds masters’ degrees from Clark Atlanta University (applied mathematics), Stanford University (operations research) and Claremont Graduate University (economics). She completed her doctorate in economics/mathematics at Claremont Graduate University.
Dr. Sebastian Tello-Trillo is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Economics at the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy at the University of Virginia. His fields of specialization are Health Economics and Applied Microeconomics and he has interests in the areas of health policy in the U.S. and Latin America. Sebastian was born and raised in Lima, Peru. After coming to the U.S he received a B.S. in Pure Mathematics and Economics from Florida State University, where he wrote an honors thesis on parents’ decisions of signing up their children to SCHIP. Furthermore, Sebastian was a participant of the AEA summer training program at UC Santa Barbara in 2008 and 2010. Prior to his studies at Vanderbilt he was a project associate for Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA). During his time in IPA, he worked under Prof. Mushfiq Mobarak, from Yale School of Management on projects of seasonal migration in Bangladesh and stove marketing in Bangladesh. Asides from Economics and Mathematics, Sebastian enjoy photography, filming, video-editing, writing letters, interviewing, board games, and playing harmonica among other things.
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, 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.
In “The Paradox of Warlord Democracy”, he introduced a novel philosophical approach to Political Economy, as he explored the conditions under which liberal democracies can arise from civil wars and expounded on the implications of this argument for classical political theory and contemporary social theory as they relate to democratization and authoritarianism.
In addition, Wantchekon’s research includes groundbreaking studies on the long-term effects of historical events. For example, his paper “Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa” (AER, 2011, co-authored with Nathan Nunn) links current differences in trust levels within Africa to the transatlantic and Indian Ocean slave trade, and is widely regarded as one of the foundational papers in the emerging field of cultural economics. Similarly, his “Critical Junctures” paper (co-authored with Omar Garcia Ponce) finds that levels of democracy in post-Cold War Africa can be traced back to the nature of its anti-colonial independence movements.
More recently, Wantchekon has developed a novel approach to study the effect of education on social mobility using historical micro-data from the first regional schools in late 19th century and early 20th century Benin. His research uncovers that the schools essentially functioned as natural experiments with a two-step hierarchical design creating arbitrary, but known, forms of spillovers. He uses the data to reveal externalities in intergenerational social mobility that are driven by parental aspirations. Wantchekon is currently applying this applied micro approach to social history in his studies of the origins of gender norms, demand for education, and ethnic/racial inequalities in Africa and the U.S.
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 Nicolas Van De Walle for Foreign Affairs in 2013.
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 served as Secretary of the American Political Science Association and on the Executive Committee of the Afrobarometer Network. He 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 he holds a PhD in Economics from Northwestern University. For a full profile of Professor Wantchekon, please visit the IMF website for a Finance & Development article entitled “Ground Breaker.”
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