Development Research Group

Topics: health; education; and the interactions between them; social protection and evaluation of cash transfers; the impact of financial incentives on health and education outcomes; evaluating the impact of HIV/AIDS and COVID-19 interventions and policies 

Topics: gender; family economics; demography; political economy; fertility; family planning; sexual and reproductive health; women's social networks; son preference; sex ratio imbalances; women's work; digital job search; female entrepreneurship; gender-based violence; marriage markets

Topics: labor; economics of the family and gender; economic shocks; social protection; methodological studies on household surveys

Topics: human capital accumulation; school-based violence reduction programs; mental health; crime and violence; psychology-based programs to improve social-emotional skills; higher (tertiary) education 

Topics: internal and international migration and its impacts on households and communities; evaluation of active labor market policies; school-to-work transitions; long-term effects of shocks to employment; population aging and labor supply decisions; women's labor supply decisions

Topics: labor economics (drivers of informality, labor market mismatches, overeducation, scarring effects and radicalization); public economics (household saving decisions, pension reform, social protection for informal workers); gender economics (gaps in earnings, careers and social protection coverage) 

Topics: education; human capital; and behavioral economics

Topics: taxation and public finance (determinants of compliance, improving administration, use of technology, political economy); social protection (cash transfers and livelihoods programs); education and youth employment (apprenticeship programs, gender gaps, impact of role models); national and ethnic identity

Topics: health economics; health decision making; demand for healthcare; quality of health care; time-preferences; intertemporal decisions and dealing with economic shocks; methods to measure preferences; adaptive methods to make economic experiments faster and more efficient; non-monetary incentives; demographics of marriage markets 

Topics: banking; capital flows; corporate and sovereign bonds; benchmark indexes; debt and equity markets; emerging market finance; financial crises; financial development; financial markets and institutions; firm financing; firm performance and growth; institutional investors; international finance; micro and macro financial risk

Topics: public finance; optimal tax design; informality and tax evasion; fiscal policy and inequality; financial inclusion

Topics: macroeconomic aspects of economic development: firm dynamics, distortions, and aggregate productivity. real and financial shocks: macroeconomic and firm-level effects. 

Topics: macroeconomic aspects of development and trade

Topics: public economics, political institutions and incentives theory, applied to emergent problems of government across sectors (climate change; green infrastructure; fragility and conflict; water scarcity; public health; structural transformation & local government)

Topics: macroeconomics; regional and aggregate economic development; structural change; occupational choice

Topics: fiscal policy (especially fiscal transfers); economic growth; exchange rate pass-through; monetary policy; conflict, political economy

Topics: industrial organization; competitive and comparative advantage; trade; structural change; impact investing

Topics: international macroeconomics; international finance; monetary-fiscal issues in emerging market economies 

Topics: governance; political economy; public finance

Topics: taxation; public economics; labor economics 

Topics: the measurement of wellbeing and poverty; the evaluation of health and social policies; determinants of poverty reduction

Topics: poverty measurement; public economics and mechanism design; wellbeing measurement

Topics: institutions and their relationships to economic development; the political economy of institutional development; fragility, conflict and violence; migration and forced displacement

Topics: social protection; nutrition and early childhood development

Topics: health and nutrition, cash transfers, and gender

Topics: cash transfer programs; human capital accumulation among adolescent females and young women; family planning; using adaptive experiments, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to improve women's health

Topics: the social, cultural, and political context of extreme poverty in developing countries. narrative economics, political economy, Machine Learning, Mixed-Methods, Deliberative Democracy, Participation

Topics: forced migration; refugees; firms decision making; and violence and conflict 

Topics: poverty and inequality measurement; small area estimation; intergenerational mobility and equality of opportunity; axiomatic approaches to income measurement; spatial econometrics; the transmission of price inflation and volatility 

Topics: strategies for enhancing state capability for implementation; crafting more effective interaction between informal and formal justice systems; mixed methods to assess the effectiveness of "complex" development interventions

Topics: technical change; trade; carbon leakage in environmental policy instrument design

Topics: applied microeconomics with a focus on Africa and rural issues; property rights; contracts in land and investment incentives; impact evaluation, especially of land-related project; risk coping and management 

Topics: economic consequences of air pollution; the impacts of environmental conditions on human capital formation; the role of environmental conditions in generating income inequality across space; distributional consequences of climate change adaptation policy; water conservation; how different legal structures impact environmental pollution 

Topics: environmental management; pollution control; health hazards of pollution; poverty/environment nexus; setting priorities in pollution control; deforestation; biodiversity loss; impacts of climate change on coastal zones and climate extremes; adaptation; infrastructure investments for climate change mitigation; cost-effective regulations

Topics: income and asset inequality and its relationship to poverty reduction and growth; access to land; land markets and land reform and their impact on household welfare and agricultural productivity; land tenure and its impact on investment and environmental sustainability; capacity building for policy analysis and evaluation

Topics: wildlife and biodiversity conservation; marine fisheries; protected area management; forests; tourism

Topics: land policy and tenure security related to institutions

Topics: agriculture; rural institutions; human capital; land tenancy; groundwater markets; rural roads; risk-coping; child nutrition and schooling; the economics of marriage 

Topics: consumer decision-making around energy and rural electrification; women-owned enterprises; psychology and economics

Topics: transportation; industrial organization; international trade; digital platforms 

Topics: urban development, including issues related to internal migration, transport and land use; land tenure, land markets and land governance; foreign direct investments in agricultural land

Topics: economic geography; urbanization; rural-urban transformation; internal migration; intergenerational educational mobility; infrastructure; labor markets; markets and institutions; gender

Topics: energy market; green technology adoption; efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and distributional impacts of environmental policies; climate change adaptation 

Topics: impacts of infrastructure on health and education; child health and nutrition; the welfare impacts of weather shocks; intergenerational effects of weather shocks; adaptation to climate change; agriculture and rural livelihoods

Topics: climate change policy and economics; carbon pricing; infrastructure & economic growth; infrastructure & poverty; energy economics and policy; renewable energy; biofuels; energy efficiency; electricity economics; regional electricity trade; urban planning; power system planning & modeling; energy sector modeling; general equilibrium modeling

Topics: global value chains; globalization and resilience to shocks, links between globalization and technological change, and between trade and environment, economics of globally integrated data-intensive industries

Topics: globalization and labor markets; globalization and jobs; the distributional effects of international trade; regional and sectoral mobility of workers; unemployment; informality; migration 

Topics: drivers of firm-level upgrading and industrial development, links between globalization and technological change, and the distributional impacts of trade and FDI 

Topics: consequences of openness to trade and FDI for firm-level productivity; innovation and quality upgrading; impact evaluation of trade-related policy interventions such as export promotion and customs reforms; link between exporter growth and dynamics, development, policies and shocks; corruption in customs and tax evasion

Topics: international trade, urban, and development economics; applied micro topics, especially in education; global value chains and the propagation of shocks through production networks; migration and trade

Topics: trade; productivity and growth at the firm and aggregate level; domestic value-added in exports; shared-supplier spillovers of FDI; rules of origin and firm productivity; valorem equivalent of non-tariff measures; trade restrictiveness indexes

Topics: globalization of product and labor markets; migration; forced displacement; brain drain and high skilled migration; government and economic development 

Topics: corruption; state capture; tax evasion; aid effectiveness; trade; labor markets 

Topics: international trade; urban economics; labor economics