Dilip Mookherjee works on a combination of theoretical and empirical topics related to development economics. Current empirical projects focus on various Asian countries, addressing topics such as political clientelism and delivery of welfare programs, middlemen and marketing supply chains, and the role of local community networks in financial intermediation and entrepreneurship. His theoretical interests include the effects of automation on income distribution and control of collusion in hierarchies. He is a member/fellow/affiliate of BREAD, CEPR, EDI and the NBER Development groups, and Lead Academic of the IGC India Program.
Andrew Newman is currently engaged in several research agendas pertaining to organizational economics, industrial organization, institutions, inequality, and the economics of the household. Recent work involves a unifying organizational- and industrial-economics theory of endogenous market structure. Other work develops testable theories of how firms’ internal organization decisions such as outsourcing or vertical integration interact with markets and how those decisions, in turn, affect product market performance, particularly in the face of globalization. He has been contributing to the economic theory of matching markets and applying that to affirmative action policies. He is also exploring how the processes by which people learn about their economic environment can lead to organizational dysfunction and change.
Benjamin Marx‘s research interests are mainly in political economy and development. One strand of his research studies the determinants of political accountability, state capacity, and voting behavior in developing countries. He has worked in various countries including Kenya, Senegal, and Uganda as well as, more recently, Indonesia. Another strand explores the political economy of religion, with the goal of better understanding the interplay between religious institutions, politics, and culture. In addition, he is interested in the study of discrimination and the political economy of urban poverty.
Christophe Chamley’s research is on social learning, coordination of expectations and markets in macroeconomics, and in the history of states’ finances from 5000 BC to the 19th century.
Daniele Paserman specializes in labour, applied microeconomics, political economy and behavioural economics.
David Lagakos is an associate professor in economics and research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, lead academic for the International Growth Centre’s Ghana program, an editor of the Review of Economics Dynamics and co-editor of the Journal of Development Economics.
Ivan Fernandez Val specializes in theoretical and applied econometrics. He has recently been working on nonlinear panel data and distributional methods with applications to labour economics and other fields.
James Feigenbaum is an economic historian and a labour economist whose research explores the roots of economic inequality and intergenerational mobility. Recent projects include studies of the negative effects of the Great Depression on economic mobility, the short- and long-run effects of wartime capital destruction during the US Civil War, and estimating the effect of lead exposure and violent crime in the early 20th century.
Jianjun Miao continues to work on two lines of research. The first concerns macroeconomic implications of financial frictions: specifically business cycle and growth implications of bubbles and credit constraints. The second involves new models of ambiguity sensitive preferences and applications to macroeconomics and finance.
Kevin Lang’s research concerns education and labour markets, with a particular focus on discrimination. While his work is primarily centred on the United States, he is currently involved in projects in Spain (on the effects of a policy allowing mothers to work part-time) and Singapore (on the market for illegal money-lending).
Laurence Kotlikoff specializes in fiscal policy, macroeconomics, money and banking, computational economics, healthcare, and personal finance. He also works on the economics of robots. The author or co-author of 19 books and hundreds of journal articles, Kotlikoff is also a prolific columnist and a #1 NY Times Best Seller author. His columns have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Forbes, PBS.org, VOX, and many of the other top newspapers and magazines in the U.S. and abroad. His recent work has focused on carbon taxation, inequality and fiscal progressivity, work disincentives and labour supply, the causes of the great recession, the future of global economic power, computing large scale life-cycle models with aggregate shocks, and modelling the economic impact of artificial intelligence.
Linh Tô works on topics in labour, public, and behavioural economics. Her work involves using quasi-experimental methods and administrative datasets as well as experimental methods to understand labour market outcomes, social interactions, and household decisions with an emphasis on the role of information and beliefs and the economics of gender.
Mahesh Karra is an IED affiliate and Assistant Professor of Global Development Policy at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies and Associate Director of the Human Capital Initiative at the Global Development Policy Center. His academic and research interests are broadly in development economics, health economics, quantitative methods, and applied demography. His research utilizes experimental and non-experimental methods to investigate the relationships between population, health, and economic development in low and middle-income countries.
Marianne Baxter’s research is in the fields of macroeconomics and international economics. In research related to her prior work on macroeconomic consequences of home production, she has been engaged in a large-scale econometric analysis of household expenditures and household time use as they pertain to home production. She is also working with a new data set using IKEA catalogues from many countries and up to twenty years to study the determinants of departures from the law of one price.
Martin Fiszbein works in the fields of economic growth, development, history, and urban economics. In particular, his research seeks to understand the dynamics of structural change, human capital formation and economic growth. In a series of current projects, he studies the effects of the production structure on patterns of long-run growth. These works examine predictions from a variety of macro-development and urban economics models using rich subnational data from the United States and from Argentina.
Natalia Ramondo received her BA in Economics from Universidad de Buenos Aires in 1997, her MA in Economics from Universidad Torcuato di Tella in 2000, and her PhD in Economics from the University of Chicago in 2006. She was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Texas from 2006 to 2010, a Kenen Fellow at Princeton University in 2009-2010, and an Assistant Professor at Arizona State University from 2010 to 2013. In 2013, she became an Assistant Professor of Economics in the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego, and was promoted to tenured Associate Professor in 2017. She joined the Department of Economics at BU in 2020. Ramondo is a trade economist whose research is focused broadly on issues of globalization, particularly with respect to the role of multinational firms. Ramondo is part of a new wave of economists using quantitative models and detailed datasets to understand the welfare gains (and losses) from various forms of economic openness. Her research is theoretically rigorous, timely, and relevant for policy.
Pankaj Tandonconcentrates on technological change, microeconomics, public enterprises, and food policy. He has worked on evaluating privately financed infrastructure projects and privatization programs. His main field experience has been in Egypt, India, Mexico, and Venezuela.
Pascual Restrepo’s research interests span labour and macroeconomics. His current research examines the impact of technology, and in particular of automation, on labour markets, employment, wages, inequality, the distribution of income, and growth. Recent empirical projects include a study of the impact of industrial robots on US labour markets, a study of how the decline of routine jobs interacted with the great recession, and a study on how ageing and shortages of labour induce firms to automate their production process. His theoretical work centres on developing micro-founded models of technology choice to think about the short and long-run implications of different technologies and whether the resulting growth process is balanced.
Rachel Brulé is an Assistant Professor of Global Development Policy at Boston University’s Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, Graduate Faculty with BU’s Department of Political Science, a Core Faculty at the Global Development Policy Center and affiliated faculty with the Institute for Economic Development. Her research expertise is in comparative politics with a substantive focus on gender, South Asia, the political economy of development, political representation, and institutions. Her research combines careful causal identification with innovative theory building to understand the conditions under which policies intended to improve equality may deepen inequality, as well as when, how, and why crises may mobilize long-term support for improving equality.
Randall Ellis’ recent research focuses on how health care payment systems affect consumers, health care providers and health plans. He is actively using big data to address policy issues, consumer demand, and understand market behaviour. He continues to conduct research on risk adjustment and predictive modelling, which resulted in the payment models used in the US since 2000 and Germany since 2009, with similar models being evaluated in other countries. He was recently awarded a grant from HHS Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality for “Advanced Risk Adjusters and Predictive Formulas for IDC-10 Based Risk Adjustment”. He is also working on health care innovation, feasible transitions to Medicare for All, and children with medical complexity. During the past year, Ellis gave talks in the US, Israel, Japan, and Belgium. He is currently collaborating with researchers in the US, Netherlands, France, and Brazil.
Raymond Fisman works in two main areas of political economy – the causes and consequences of inequality, and corruption. His recent work on the consequences of social ties in Indian banking was recently published in the American Economic Review, and his research on social ties and favouritism in Chinese science in the Journal of Political Economy. His book on corruption, with political scientist Miriam Golden, was published in April 2017.
Robert A. Margo’s recent publications include “Gallman Revisited: Blacksmithing and American Manufacturing, 1850-1870,” (with Jeremy Atack) in the January 2019 issue of Cliometrica; and “Automation of Manufacturing in the Late 19th Century: The Hand and Machine Labor Study,” (with Jeremy Atack and Paul Rhode) in the Spring 2019 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives.
Robert King continues to focus his research on monetary policy and macroeconomics. Particular areas of current interest are the nature of price dynamics; the influence of reputation and credibility on optimal monetary policy; and the history of banking markets.
Robert Lucas has completed two books in the last year. Crossing the Rural-Urban Divide: A Compilation of Prior and Fresh Evidence from Developing Countries is under review for publication. This volume includes critiques and summaries of the existing literature on migration between the rural and urban sectors of developing countries, and presents fresh analyses of microdata from 75 countries on various aspects of these migrations, contradicting the conventional wisdom in some cases, supporting it in others, but also addressing several topics not previously examined. Portions of this book were presented in Abu Dhabi and the UK in the spring of 2020 before the pandemic curtailed further international presentations. Migration and Development: The Role for Development Aid was published in 2019 by the Swedish Ministry of Justice and presented in Stockholm. This report critically examines aid policies in the context of global, cross-border migrations and refugee flows, with recommendations on the future role of aid in fulfilling the objectives of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration. Lucas has now gone on to examine the connections between short-term migration, food security and child health in seven countries of Sub-Saharan Africa.
Stefania Garetto is a trade economist whose work is centred on the study of foreign direct investment and the activities of multinational corporations, both from a real and a financial perspective. Stefania’s current research combines empirical analysis and structural dynamic modelling to understand the creation of multinational firms via mergers and acquisitions, and their expansion in space over time. She is a research associate of NBER and a research fellow of CEPR.
Tarek Alexander Hassan’s research focuses on international finance and social factors in economic growth and macro-finance. His work in international finance focuses on large and persistent differences in interest rates across countries and the effect of exchange rate manipulation on the allocation of capital across countries. Another set of papers studies the effect of social structure on economic growth and the effect of historical migration and ethnic diversity on foreign direct investment.
Yuhei Miyauchi’s primary research interest is to understand how the socio-economic activity is shaped within cities and across regions. Yuhei tackles these questions using a combination of theory and new sources of granular data, such as cell phone, smartphone transaction data and firm-level transaction data.
Professors Emeriti: Peter Doeringer and Shane Hunt