One of the pleasures of my career has been the interesting people I have worked with. Here are people I am co-authors with (not including collaborative volumes like the World Development Report). They are listed, for lack of any other focal criteria, alphabetically by last name, most with a brief description and some pointers to their research and, in parenthesis, our joint papers. (this page is in progress)
Vivi Alatas. Vivi is a Lead Economist for the World Bank. She has done lots of interesting issue on poverty and targeting of social programs, including this really interesting paper about how community engagement in targeting increases satisfaction and relies on different ideas about poverty status that standard proxy means testing. (Voice Lessons).
Yamini Aiyar. She is the President and Chief Executive of the Centre for Policy Research in Delhi, India. She has done research on middle tier (block level) implementers in education in India (The Post Office Paradox) and has a great new book on Delhi’s education reforms coming soon. (Taxes, Value Subtraction).
Matthew Andrews. Matt heads the Building State Capability program at Harvard Kennedy School, which is doing amazing things. such as the PDIA online course, the Implementing Public Policy Online executive education course and the PDIA Toolkit. His research is always insightful on key issues (book on public financial management reforms in Africa, paper on the difference between “Solution and leader driven” and PDIA reforms). (Building State Capability, Looking Like a State, Escaping Capability Traps).
Amanda Beatty. Amanda is now a Senior Researcher at Mathematica Policy Research. She worked with me as one of the architects of the RISE research programme. Has done research research on the evolution of learning in Indonesia (Schooling Progress, Learning Reversal) and earlier research on community participation and learning outcomes. (Slow Down, Overambitious Curriculum).
Peter Biar Ajak. Peter was a student of mine in the MPA/ID program, returned to South Sudan, completed a PhD from Cambridge, was a political prisoner in South Sudan, and is in the USA and is a fellow at the National Endowment for Democracy. (Building a State).
Michael Clemens. Michael is at Center for Global Development. His research on migration issues is fantastic with papers on the impact of end of the Bracero program, productivity differences between USA and India using randomized allocation of visas across workers, an overview on wage gaps/gains from migration, trillion dollar bills. and 2021 research on violence and wages of migration. I am eager for his forthcoming book: The Walls of Nations. (Place Premium, New Case for Immigration Restrictions (against them, actually), Income per Natural).
David Dollar. David is now a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and, having followed China since the 1970s (and living there for many years), one of the USA’s most knowledgeable experts on China. His work (with Aart Kraay) on economic growth and the incomes of the poor is a key contribution to a big debate (2002, 2015). (Assessing Aid).
William Easterly. Even though Bill and I have been friends and colleagues since meeting at MIT in 1985 and working at the World Bank in the 1980s and 1990s, I only wrote one paper with Bill. He has written many great papers and books: The Elusive Quest for Growth, The White Man’s Burden, The Tyranny of Experts. (Good Policy or Good Luck).
Ricardo Faini. Ricardo passed away tragically young (just 55) in 2007. In 1986-1987 he was my boss and mentor when I was a research assistant at the World Bank and learned a great deal from him and his example. (Import Demand).
Deon Filmer. Deon is the Director of the Research Group at the World Bank. Deon was the co-director (with Halsey Rogers) of the World Development Report 2018, Learning to Realize Education’s Progress. Deon has a great recent paper on (relatively) long-term tracking children in Cambodia who were given scholarships either based on need (proxy means targeting) or based on the existing learning performance (‘merit’) that shows the children who got ‘need’ scholarships attended more schooling due to the scholarship–but had no higher learning than ‘control’ children–and no improvements in any other life indicators. I wrote lots of papers with Deon (Without Tears, The Effect of Household Wealth on Education Attainment, What Education Production Functions Really Show, Does Money Matter?, Weak Links in the Chain (part I, Diagnosis and part II, Prescription), A Millennium Learning Goal).
Faezeh Foroutan.
Jonah Gelbach. Jonah is currently a Professor of Law at Berkley Law school and does research on welfare issues in the USA. Before all that, when he was a graduate student and I was at the World Bank, he taught me a lot of about theory. (Is more for the poor less for the poor, Leakier can be better)
Mary Hallward-Driemeier. Mary is a Senior Adviser in the Finance, Competitiveness and Innovation Practice at the World Bank. She was a driving force behind the Enterprise Surveys and founder of the Microeconomics and Growth network. Her latest book is Trouble in the Making: The Future of Manufacturing-Led Development. (How Business is Done, Deals versus Rules).
Jeffrey Hammer. Jeff is now semi-retired from the World Bank and teaching at Princeton. His recent initiative, One Hundred Homes shows photos and videos of a house for a household at each percentile of the Indian income distribution. You would learn more about living conditions and the distribution of income and the global gaps from this than from dozens and dozens of papers. His paper (with Jishnu Das) Money for Nothing: The Dire Straits of Medical Practice in Delhi, India is both a seminal paper on measuring the quality of medical care and set a record for references to the band Dire Straits in an economic paper. The paper I most regret never writing would have been co-authored with Jeff. (Social Capital, Weak Links in the Chain (part I, Diagnosis and part II, Prescription, Its all about MeE).
Farah Hani. Farah currently works with the Growth Lab at CID. (The Economics of International Migrations).
Ricardo Hausmann. Ricardo has done everything economists do: a Minister of Planning in Venezuela, Chief Economist of the IADB, and is now head of the Growth Lab at CID. His research on growth diagnostics (with Andres Velasco and Dani Rodrik), export structure (with Dani Rodrik), complexity (with Cesar Hidalgo), and structural transformation is important and innovative and useful. Perhaps my favorite thing about Harvard was Red Sox games with Ricardo. (Growth Accelerations).
Oleh Havrylyshyn. Oleh Havrylyshyn was a Ukrainian economist who worked for the World Bank (where I worked with him) and the IMF and after the end of the USSR, the Ukrainian government as a deputy minister. He passed away Sept 20, 2020. (European Trade Patterns after the Transition)
Jon Isham. Jon has been a professor at Middlebury College since 1999 and works on environmental issues (climate change) and headed the Center for Social Entrepreneurship. (Varieties of the Resource Experience, Civil Liberties and Performance of Projects, Does Participation Improve Performance).
Michelle Kaffenberger. Michelle is currently a researcher with the RISE Research Programme. Before RISE she worked on digital finance issues with CGAP. She is working on measuring the coherence of the actual and enacted curriculum and coping with the learning losses from COVID. (Women’s Education Even Better than We Thought, Structured Model of the Dynamics of Learning, More Schooling or More Learning?, Failing to Plan).
Sabyashachi Kar. Sabyasachi is a Professor at the Institute for Economic Growth, Delhi.
Devesh Kapur. Devesh was the director of the Center for the Advanced Study of India at University of Pennsylvania and is now director of Asia Programs and Starr Foundation Professor of South Asian Studies at The Johns Hopkins SAIS. [More]
Charles Kenny. Charles is a researcher at the Center for Global Development. He has written a couple of great books, including Getting Better: Why Global Development is Succeeding (and a version for middle schoolers, Your World, Better) and The Plague Cycle. (Promoting Millennial Development Ideals).
Masoomeh Khandan.
Michael Kremer. After Michael’s second year of graduate school he came as a summer intern to the World Bank and worked on my only paper with four authors of which I am the least cited: Easterly, Kremer, Pritchett and Summers. I learned from Michael what Salieri felt like. His papers on O-rings and Disorganization are deeply insightful and his work can always spark insights on old issues (paper on textbooks in Kenya with Glewwe and Moulin). Oh, and he won a Nobel Prize. (Good Policy or Good Luck).
David Lindauer. David recently retired from teaching at Wellesley College. He was one of the authors of the leading development textbook (Perkins, Radelet, Lindauer and Block ). He did important work on public sector pay and public sector pay reform, especially in Africa, and was an author of the World Development Report 1995 on labor (which put me on the path to working on labor mobility issues). (What’s the Big Idea? )
Deepa Narayan. Deepa Narayan is the author of Voices of the Poor and the driving force behind a follow up (on which Soumya Kapoor I were also authors on one of the volumes) Moving out of Poverty and a number of other important works on empowerment and community participation in development. (Does Participation Improve Performance, Cents and Sociability).
Daniel E. Ortega. Daniel is a Venezuelan economist. ( ).
Menno Pradhan. Menno is professor in Project and Program Evaluation for International Development at the VU and UvA Economics departments. He has done great work on Indonesia and especially on education over the years including: Double for Nothing (showing that doubling teacher pay had no impact on learning in Indonesia), Improving Educational Quality through Enhancing Community Participation (an RCT about community engagement in schools) and Scores, Cameras, Action (an RCT about incentivizing teachers in very remote areas). (Eating Like Which Joneses).
Chandra Bhan Prasad is an Indian journalist and Dalit activist. One of my favorite experiences in writing a paper was “ground truthing” the data we were using with a visit to the survey villages and spending some time at his home. I did some data analysis that produced striking results–but learned the most from the visit. (Rethinking Inequality).
Dani Rodrik. Dani is a super-star economist and global scholar more generally. His books have been widely influential and in many instances agenda setting: Has Globalization Gone Too Far?, One Economics, Many Recipes. He has been working recently on populism. He was the key actor in the creation of the MPA/ID program at Harvard Kennedy School. (Growth Accelerations).
Kunal Sen. Kunal is currently Director of UNU-WIDER.
Geeta Sethi
Sudarno Sumarto. Sudarno was the founding director of the Indonesian SMERU Research Institute and has been a policy adviser for TNP2K (National Team for the Acceleration of Poverty Reduction). He has done work (together with other scholars) on national health insurance and on the role of information in reducing leakage in targeted programs. (Quantifying Vulnerability to Poverty, Eating like which “Joneses”, Evolution of Poverty during the crisis, Targeted Programs in an Economic Crisis, Safety Nets and Safety Ropes).
Lawrence Summers. When I was a young researcher I had the great privilege to work with Larry Summers when he was (at 37 years old) the Vice President of Research and Chief Economist of the World Bank. He went on to become the Secretary of the US Treasury (1999-2001), President of Harvard (2001-2006 ) and director of the National Economic Council (2009-2010). I went on to do none of that, but I did write more and better papers because of the many things about the science and craft and practice of economics I learned from him and “write about the economy, not economics” has been a touchstone of mine. We taught together and Harvard and are friends. (Wealthier is Healthier, Good Policy and Good Luck, Asiaphoria Meets Regression to the Mean).
Emiliana Vegas. Emiliana has been engaged in education at the World Bank (where she spearheaded the SABER project), at the ADB and is now at the Brookings Institution where she is the co-director of the Center for Universal Education. (Attracting and Retaining Qualified Teachers in Argentina).
Martina Viarengo. Martina Viarengo is an Associate Professor in the Department of International Economics at the Graduate Institute, Geneva Switzerland. She has done research on an array of topics including associative matching in marriage in Latin America and the USA, magnitude of migrant return in early 20th century migration to the USA, the role of socialization of migrants in expanding compulsory schooling in the USA. (Superstars for the Economic Mundial, Variance in Public versus Private School Quality, Why Demographic Suicide?, Four Hard Facts from PISA-D, When will states allow private schooling, Life Expectancy).
Frauke de Weijer. Frauke is now a Senior Policy Officer in ECDPM (European Center for Development Policy Management), an independent think tank working on Europe and African development issues. Before coming to HKS for a Masters she worked for seven years in Afghanistan. (Fragile States: Stuck in a Capability Trap?).
Michael Woolcock. Michael Woolcock is a sociologist who works at the World Bank and also teaches at Harvard Kennedy School. One of the better things I did for the World Bank was lead the search committee for “non-economist social scientists” in the research group that ended up hiring Michael. His 1998 paper on social capital and development has over 8,000 citations (as of July 2021)–many successful researchers don’t get 8,000 citations total in their career. He has done research on micro-finance, how development projects affect local conflict and the law. He has been a key part of a number of high profile World Bank publications ( ), most recently (). ( ).