associate professor of economics @ UC San Diego
co-founder @ GiveDirectly, Segovia, Taptap Send
affiliate / fellow @ NBER, BREAD, J-PAL, CEGA
2013 Foreign Policy leading 100 "Global Thinker"
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recent working papers

• Effects of a Universal Basic Income during the pandemic (.bib). With Abhijit Banerjee, Michael Faye, Alan Krueger, and Tavneet Suri. How is UBI effecting the lives of low-income communities in Kenya during the COVID-19 pandemic?
• General equilibrium effects of cash transfers: experimental evidence from Kenya (.bib). Revise and resubmit, Econometrica. With Dennis Egger, Johannes Haushofer, Ted Miguel and Michael Walker
  How does an inflow of ~15% of GDP affect a poor rural economy?
• Identity verification standards in welfare programs: experimental evidence from India (.bib). With Karthik Muralidharan and Sandip Sukhtankar
  How does requiring stricter, biometric ID trade off errors of inclusion and exclusion?
• General equilibrium effects of (improving) public employment programs (.bib; online appendix). Revise and resubmit, Econometrica. With Karthik Muralidharan and Sandip Sukhtankar
  How does offering large-scale public employment affect rural markets?

publications

• Pathways of persuasion (.bib). Forthcoming, Games and Economic Behavior With Lucas Coffman.
  What are the roles of self-interest and other-regard in persuasion? (experimental instructions).
• Improving last-mile service delivery using phone-based monitoring (.bib). Forthcoming, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. With Karthik Muralidharan and Sandip Sukhtankar and Jeff Weaver
  Does simply calling people to measure service delivery outcomes improve them?
• Universal Basic Income in the developing world (.bib). Annual Review of Economics 11, August 2019, pp. 959-983. With Abhijit Banerjee and Tavneet Suri
  Should developing countries give everyone enough money to live on?
• Experimentation at scale (.bib). Journal of Economic Perspectives 31(4), Fall 2017, pp. 103-24. With Karthik Muralidharan
  Should program evaluations in development economics be "bigger"?
• Building state capacity: evidence from biometric Smartcards in India (.bib). With Karthik Muralidharan and Sandip Sukhtankar. American Economic Review 106(1), 2016, pp. 2895-2929.
  Does investing in biometric payments infrastructure enhance state capacity and performance?
• The marginal rate of corruption in public programs (.bib). Journal of Public Economics 104, 2013, pp. 52-64. With Sandip Sukhtankar.
  How should policy-makers determine the optimal size of "leaky" public programs?
• Corruption dynamics: the golden goose effect (.bib). American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 5 (4), 2013, pp. 230-69. With Sandip Sukhtankar.
  Do corrupt agents respond to dynamic incentives as predicted by the Becker-Stigler theory? Winner, Best Paper Prize (2014), AEJ: Economic Policy
• Targeting with agents (.bib). American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 5 (1), 2013, pp. 206-238. With Antonia Attanassova, Mariane Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan.
  How should a social planner design targeting rules when he knows the implementing agents are corrupt?
• Political aid cycles (.bib). American Economic Review 102 (7), 2012, pp. 3516-30. With Michael Faye.
  Do donors use foreign aid (ODA) to influence elections in developing countries?
• Filtered social learning (.bib). Journal of Political Economy 119 (4), 2011, pp. 686-720.
  Do decentralized exchanges of knowledge lead to efficient aggregate learning?

other working papers / work in progress

• Managing self-confidence: theory and experimental evidence (.bib). Revise and resubmit. With Markus Mobius, Muriel Niederle and Tanya Rosenblat.
  Do people bias their learning behavior to protect their own self-image? (experimental instructions)
• A theory of good intentions (.bib).
  Why isn't altruistic behavior more effective?
• Education and knowledge spillovers (.bib).
  What spillover mechanism is most consistent with reduced-form models, knowledge policy, and the data?
• Maternal cash transfers. With Karthik Muralidharan and Sandip Sukhtankar and Jeff Weaver
  Is a transfer to pregnant and nursing mothers an effective way to reduce child malnutrition in Jharkhand?
• Universal Basic Income. With Ahbijit Banerjee, Michael Faye, Alan Krueger and Tavneet Suri
  What happens if you guarantee everyone in a community a basic income for over a decade?
• Structuring cash transfers. With Anandi Mani, Sendhil Mullainathan and Anuj Shah
  Can we use behavioral economics to design smarter transfers to the extreme poor?
• Policy evaluation by revealed preference. With Karthik Muralidharan and Sandip Sukhtankar
  What mode of public service delivery do beneficiaries choose if we let them vote with their feet?
• Social learning and consumer demand. With Markus Mobius and Tanya Rosenblat
  How do peers in a social network affect demand for new products?

other

• Tavneet Suri and I put together some numbers to track the representation of women in various development economics research groups and forums. Please contact one of us if you spot errors or would like to contribute numbers.