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- 4 days ago42 min
S7 Ep46: Rethinking development cooperation: The case for a 'balance sheet' approach
Many conversations about development for focus on aid: how much, from whom, and for how long. But aid has never been more than a small part of what pays for a country's development, and in 2025 it fell by 23.1%. The need to rethink our attitude to development has inspired the Future of Development Cooperation Coalition (FDCC). In this week's episode, Alexia Latortue and Radha Rajkotia of FDCC talk to Tim Phillips about its first report,. The report assesses the development challenges of LMICs using a balance sheet approach, with assets on one side and liabilities on the other. Tax revenue, remittances, pension and sovereign wealth funds, trade, natural resources and the skills of the population sit on the asset side. Unsustainable debt, illicit financial flows, poor credit ratings, weak institutions, climate exposure and conflict sit on the other.The idea? Each country focuses on the policies to develop their most important assets, and minimise their most problematic liabilities. They argue that governments and donors alike should stop thinking of developing countries as recipients of aid, and start thinking of them as partners in economic development.The research behind this episode:Future of Development Cooperation Coalition. 2026. "The Development Balance Sheet: Rethinking Development Cooperation from the Ground Up." Published 20 May 2026. Research team: Radha Rajkotia, John Norris and Mma Amara Ekeruche.To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim, Alexia Latortue, and Radha Rajkotia. 2026. "Rethinking development cooperation: The case for a 'balance sheet' approach." VoxDev Talks (podcast). About the guestsAlexia Latortue is Head of Secretariat of the Future of Development Cooperation Coalition and a Distinguished Non-Resident Fellow at the Center for Global Development. She served as Assistant Secretary for International Trade and Development at the US Treasury, where she led work on reforming the multilateral development banks and on using public finance to pull private capital into emerging markets. She was previously Deputy CEO and Managing Director for Corporate Strategy at the Millennium Challenge Corporation, sat on the Executive Committee of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and spent ten years at the World Bank working on financial inclusion, ending as Deputy CEO of CGAP.Radha Rajkotia is Director of Research at the Future of Development Cooperation Coalition and lead researcher on this report. She was Chief Executive Officer of Building Markets and, before that, Chief Research and Policy Officer at Innovations for Poverty Action, running its strategy across 22 countries. She spent eleven years leading the economic recovery and development unit at the International Rescue Committee, on work spanning cash-based relief and job creation in conflict settings. She holds a PhD in Refugee Studies from the University of Sussex, is a Senior Policy Fellow at the Henry Leir Institute at Tufts University, and teaches at Georgetown.Research cited in this episodeThe balance sheet approach. The report sets out assets and liabilities but argues that neither is a checklist. Some entries are country-specific, such as natural resource endowments or exposure to climate risk. Others are structural, such as a sovereign credit rating, which constrains or enables progress regardless of what a government does at home. The point of the exercise is situational awareness before prioritisation, not a universal to-do list.The 30 national development strategies. The research team reviewed the current development strategies of 30 countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America. All 30 prioritise economic transformation and human capital. Governance appears as a stand-alone pillar in two-thirds of them. Inequality is a defining element in almost every Latin American strategy and largely absent as an explicit constraint in Africa and Asia. Most countries frame technology as digital economy rather than as AI governance or chip access, which the report reads as a widening sophistication gap.Nigeria and Ethiopia. The report's worked comparison. Ethiopia attracts more than three times Nigeria's foreign direct investment despite being roughly 100 million people smaller. Nigeria has strong tax revenues, considerable pension fund assets, a heavy debt servicing burden and large losses to illicit financial flows. Ethiopia has a narrow tax base and weak compliance, suffers far less from illicit flows, carries a lighter debt service burden a
- 1 weeks ago37 min
S7 Ep45: Cape Town's day zero: How data rebuilt a city's water resilience
By 2018 the reservoirs supplying Cape Town were down to 20% of capacity. If they reached 13.5%, the city would need to shut down parts of the water network and send residents to collection points to fetch water. That was known as Day Zero, and the rain came just in time to avoid it.Hugh Cole (City of Cape Town) joined the city government in the middle of the crisis, and has subsequently driven the use of data for many aspects of city planning, not just for water. Cape Town now runs its own household survey, works with a private sector partner to measure net migration, and randomises the rollout of water meters so it can find out how they change behaviour. It also runs trials on its electricity subsidy to check whether the money reaches the households it is meant to reach. Cole tells Tim Phillips how the Day Zero near miss changed how the city's leadership uses evidence, and how other cities can follow the same path.The research behind this episode:Abajian, Alexander C., Cassandra Cole, Kelsey Jack, Kyle C. Meng, and Martine Visser. 2025. "Dodging Day Zero: Drought, Adaptation, and Inequality in Cape Town." NBER Working Paper 33468.Cole, Hugh, Kelsey Jack, Derek Strong, and Brendan Maughan-Brown. 2020. "City of Cape Town, South Africa: Aligning Internal Data Capabilities with External Research Partnerships." In Handbook on Using Administrative Data for Research and Evidence-based Policy, edited by Shawn Cole, Iqbal Dhaliwal, Anja Sautmann, and Lars Vilhuber. Cambridge, MA: Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab.To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim, and Hugh Cole. 2026. "Cape Town's day zero: How data rebuilt a city's water resilience." VoxDev Talks (podcast).About the guestHugh Cole is Director of Policy and Strategy and Chief Data Officer at the City of Cape Town, where his department covers strategic policy, strategic planning, research and economic analysis. He is a Visiting Senior Fellow at the School of Public Policy at the London School of Economics. Before joining the city in 2017 he was Director of Country Programmes at the International Growth Centre, running teams in 14 countries across sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia.Research cited in this episodeDay Zero. The term began in the media as the day Cape Town's taps would run dry, then settled on something more specific. It became the day dam levels would hit 13.5%, at which point the city planned to shut down parts of the reticulation network and open water collection points, sequenced so that the most vulnerable communities were affected last.Dodging Day Zero. Abajian, Cole, Jack, Meng and Visser use municipal billing records to show what the emergency measures did to different households. Before the drought, richer households used twice as much piped water as poorer ones; at the peak of the crisis they used less, partly because they could drill boreholes and substitute private groundwater for the public supply. That eroded the utility's revenue and shifted the cost of supply towards households who could not afford a private alternative, which is why the tariff reform that followed matters as much as the conservation campaign did.Zonal water balance assessment. Pressure management in the network was one of the two measures Cole credits with the largest effect during the drought, alongside communication with residents. Managing pressure means knowing the boundaries of each pressure zone, and those boundaries had drifted over years of pipes being added and not always recorded. The remapping exercise that followed compares water entering a zone with water leaving it, and it is still going on.The Green Dot map. During the drought the city published a neighbourhood level map of household water consumption, developed with academic partners including Martine Visser at the University of Cape Town. Households within their usage band showed as a green dot. The aim was peer pressure at street level rather than a citywide number.The Water, Air and Energy Lab. Launched in March 2024 by J-PAL Africa at the University of Cape Town, the City of Cape Town and Community Jameel, the WAE Lab pairs city policymakers with researchers to run randomised evaluations on clean air, water and reliable energy. Kelsey Jack is its scientific advisor. It is part of a network of J-PAL air and water labs that also includes national and state level labs in Egypt and India.Free basic electricity. Cape Town subsidises electricity for low-income households, targeted using thresholds on property value and consumption. Because eligibility
- 2 weeks ago33 min
S7 Ep44: Fifty years of Chinese growth: The gradualist reform strategy explained
In 1978, a farmer in rural China could not sell a sack of grain above the state quota, choose an employer, or move to the nearest city without a permit.In this week's VoxDev Talk, Kaiji Chen and Tao Zha (both Emory University and Atlanta Fed) explain how China dismantled barriers like this one at a time. Gradualist reform first gave farmers the right to sell surplus grain at market prices. Small state firms were privatised 19 years later, while the largest kept state backing. This style of reform powered two distinct growth engines: first, labour moving off the land, then a wave of capital into infrastructure and property. The result: half a century of unprecedented growth -- but it also produced the debt, inequality and trade tension now working against China's growth model.The research behind this episode:Chen, Kaiji, and Tao Zha. 2025. "China's Macroeconomic Development: The Role of Gradualist Reforms." Journal of Economic Literature 63 (4): 1331-62.To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim, Kaiji Chen, and Tao Zha. 2026. "Fifty years of Chinese growth: The gradualist reform strategy explained." VoxDev Talk (podcast).About the guestsKaiji Chen is Professor of Economics at Emory University and a research fellow at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta's Center for Quantitative Economic Research. His research spans financial contracts, business cycles and China's macroeconomy, with recent work on housing policy, credit allocation and household consumption in China.Tao Zha is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Economics at Emory University and executive director of the Center for Quantitative Economic Research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and was elected a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 2017. His research spans macroeconomics, financial economics and econometrics, with a long standing focus on China's economy.Research cited in this episodeThe household responsibility system. Piloted in Sichuan and Anhui from 1978 and adopted nationwide by 1980, this reform kept land collectively owned but contracted it to individual households, who could sell output above a fixed state quota at market prices. It replaced work point pay with a direct link between effort and income, and the productivity gains it released freed the rural labour surplus behind China's first wave of industrialisation.Township and village enterprises (TVEs). Rural, collectively owned firms that absorbed workers leaving agriculture through the 1980s and 1990s, often with local governments acting as guarantors for bank credit the firms could not secure alone. TVE employment grew from 28 million in 1978 to 135 million by 1997, and TVE output rose from under 6% of GDP to 26% over roughly the same period.The hukou system. China's household registration system, introduced in 1958, ties access to housing, healthcare, education and grain rations to a person's registered location, rural or urban. It made moving to a city without an urban permit practically impossible. Restrictions eased in stages from the late 1990s, and the formal rural urban distinction was removed nationwide only in 2014."Grasp the large, let go of the small." The policy, initiated in 1997, under which China privatised or allowed the bankruptcy of small and medium state owned enterprises while retaining state control of the largest, most capital intensive firms in sectors such as infrastructure, energy and real estate.WTO accession and permanent Most Favoured Nation status. China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. From 2002, permanent MFN status with the United States removed the annual threat of tariff spikes on Chinese exports, a stability that Chen and Zha's paper credits with accelerating China's shift from labour intensive exports toward electronics and other capital intensive goods.The 2009 stimulus and local government financing vehicles. In response to the global financial crisis, China launched a four trillion RMB fiscal package alongside a sharp expansion of bank lending. Much of the resulting infrastructure spending ran through local government financing vehicles, off budget entities set up to borrow for public projects; the debt they built up is now central to China's financial stability risks.Total social financing. International Monetary Fund. 2026. "People's Republic of China: 202
- 3 weeks ago35 min
S7 Ep43: Caste, race, and power: The barriers to political inclusion
The ballot cast by a landless labourer counts the same as the one cast by the landlord whose fields he works. In this way, democracy can give excluded or subordinate groups access to political power.That's not what has happened, at least, not in large parts of the Global South. Amit Ahuja (UC Santa Barbara) calls those at the bottom of the social order "subaltern groups". Three barriers stand between their votes and any lasting gain. Violence that goes unpunished. The erasure of their shared culture and history by those in power. And they have too little money and organisation to campaign for their rights.The evidence shows that since 2014 the gains that these groups made in the previous three decades have started to reverse, he warns. The old hierarchies are reasserting themselves.The research behind this episode:Ahuja, Amit. 2026. "Subaltern Mobilization in the Global South." Annual Review of Political Science 29: 391-411. Open access.To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim, and Amit Ahuja. 2026. "Caste, race, and power: The barriers to political inclusion." VoxDev Talks (podcast).About the guestAmit Ahuja is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, with research spanning ethnic parties and movements, military organisation, caste, and the politics of inclusion and exclusion in multiethnic societies. His book Mobilizing the Marginalized: Ethnic Parties Without Ethnic Movements won the 2020 Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize. He co-edited Internal Security in India: Violence, Order, and the State with Devesh Kapur.Research cited in this episodeSubaltern. The word means "of inferior rank" and was used by Antonio Gramsci in the Prison Notebooks to describe groups subordinated by a ruling elite. Ahuja gives it three working attributes: a stigmatised identity acquired at birth, disproportionate poverty, and disadvantage that passes from one generation to the next.Ranked and unranked social orders. Donald Horowitz, in Ethnic Groups in Conflict (1985; University of California Press, 2000 edition), separates societies where groups sit in a vertical hierarchy from those where they sit side by side. The Hausa-Fulani, Igbo and Yoruba in Nigeria, and Maronite Christians, Sunnis and Shia in Lebanon, compete without one being formally subordinate to another. Hierarchy is not a universal feature of diverse societies.Greed against grievance. Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler argued in 2004 that people join insurgencies to capture resources such as diamonds or minerals; Ted Gurr's Why Men Rebel (1970) argued instead that rebellion follows the gap between what people have and what they expect. Ahuja adds a third answer drawn from ethnography.The dignity of insurgency. Elisabeth Wood's study of El Salvador (2003) and Alpa Shah's work on Maoist central India (2013) both find that the poor support armed movements partly because insurgents treat them better than landlords and state officials do. Participation confers dignity in a setting built to deny it.The identity penalty. Devorah Manekin and Tamar Mitts (2022) find that nonviolent campaigns led by marginalised groups attract less popular participation and fewer elite defections than comparable campaigns led by dominant groups. Nonviolence works, but not equally well for everyone.Undocumented rights. Afro-descendant communities on Colombia's Pacific coast, the San in the Central Kalahari, and Adivasis in India's forests all hold customary claims that colonial and postcolonial registries never recorded. Without a written record they are reclassified; Adivasis became "encroachers" under British forest law and the conservation regimes that followed.The Dalit Panthers. Formed in western India in the 1970s, the group combined revolutionary politics with armed self-protection for Dalits facing caste violence, taking its name and some of its style from the Black Panther Party.Military service as a school for organisers. Black South Africans recruited during the Second World War, and Dalits taken into the British Indian Army during the world wars, both emerged with leadership training and a more assertive political style. Dominant groups are usually reluctant to arm subaltern populations; labour shortages force the question.The Indian Election Commission. Amit Ahuja and Susan Ostermann (2018) trace how the commission secured polling stations through the 1990s and 2000s, which made it possible for parti
- Aug 19, 202626 min
S7 Ep42: Masculinity norms and their economic implications
Do economists treat what men do as normal human behaviour, and then study norms around women as a departure? If so, we need to pay more attention what we mean by masculinity.That's what Pauline Grosjean (University of New South Wales, CEPR) does. She argues that these masculinity norms carry economic weight of their own. What do men around the world think "being a man" means? The consistent answers: winning against other men, self-reliance, control over women, aggression, and the avoidance of anything coded as weak or homosexual. Grosjean and her co-authors measure adherence to these core dimensions across 70 countries. How do these beliefs vary by age, economic development, and culture? And what do they predict about the way men will behave?The research behind this episode:Matavelli, Ieda, Pauline Grosjean, Ralph De Haas, and Victoria Baranov. 2026. "Masculinity Norms and Their Economic Implications." Annual Review of Economics 18:127-55.To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim, and Pauline Grosjean. 2026. "Masculinity norms and their economic implications." VoxDev Talks (podcast).About the guestPauline Grosjean is a professor in the School of Economics at the University of New South Wales and a fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research. Her research spans culture and institutions, gender roles, violence and conflict, and how historical conditions shape economic behaviour long after those conditions have gone.Research and concepts cited in this episodeMasculinity norms. Social expectations about how men should behave, or how a "real man" should behave. Grosjean draws the distinction from gender-role norms, which define men relative to women. Masculinity norms are largely about how men rank against other men. The five core dimensions measured in the survey are the importance of winning and status, self-reliance and help avoidance, violence, power over women, and avoidance of homosexuality.Global Masculinity Survey. The 70-country survey behind the review, built on measurement tools developed by social psychologists and run in partnership with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development across its countries of operation, then extended to a further 32 countries. See De Haas, Ralph, Victoria Baranov, Ieda Matavelli, and Pauline Grosjean. 2024. "Masculinity Around the World." CEPR Discussion Paper 19493 (gated).Male-biased sex ratios in colonial Australia. Grosjean's earlier work uses convict transportation, which left parts of Australia with far more men than women, as a natural experiment. Areas that were historically male-biased show stronger masculinity norms today, more violence and male suicide, and weaker support for same-sex marriage; the last of these puzzled economists, because a shortage of women should, on a supply-and-demand reading, make men more relaxed about other men's homosexuality, not less. See Baranov, Victoria, Ralph De Haas, and Pauline Grosjean. 2023. "Men. Male-Biased Sex Ratios and Masculinity Norms: Evidence from Australia's Colonial Past." Journal of Economic Growth 28:339-96.Ten to Men. An Australian longitudinal study of male health that measures both adherence to masculinity norms and a range of self-reported violent behaviour. Grosjean cites its strong associations between norm adherence and interpersonal aggression, sexual violence and self-directed harm.Testosterone and status seeking. The link often assumed to run from testosterone to aggression is, on the evidence, better read as a link to status seeking, with aggression only one of its possible expressions. Testosterone itself responds to social context, diet and caregiving, so it sits inside the culture rather than outside it.Misperceived norms. Men often overestimate how strongly other men endorse restrictive norms, and also misjudge what women want, believing women approve of controlling or emotionally closed behaviour when they do not. Grosjean links this to Marianne Bertrand's work on men declining paternity leave for fear of others' disapproval, and to the gender-segregated online spaces of the manosphere, where the norms are advertised and reinforced.School intervention in Brazil. An ongoing trial with Ieda Matavelli comparing two approaches in schools, one closer to cognitive behavioural therapy and one that directly tackles beliefs about what it means to be a man. Matavelli's earlier work documents how warped young men's views of others' expectations can be, and tests whether correcting them changes behaviour.More VoxDe
- Aug 14, 20261h 3m
S7 Ep41: How global supply chains are built
This is an episode from VoxDev's new podcast series, Ideas in Development. This series has a separate podcast feed, where you can find every episode of Oliver Hanney’s conversations with leading development thinkers.YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgwcv4fyU28 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-global-supply-chains-are-built-and-how-to/id1866874059?i=1000774798943 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5EECcLVxxEQtkX3gJZcHGH?si=94e15ed7834a4e86 Audioboom: https://audioboom.com/posts/8922412-how-global-supply-chains-are-built-and-how-to-actually-attract-investment Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/p/how-global-supply-chains-are-built Bill McRaith spent his career building supply chains – from 1980s Britain, to a factory in Panyu, China in 1990, to Ethiopia three decades later. He joins Oliver Hanney to explain what really attracts manufacturing investment to a developing economy, and why the model most countries are targeting no longer exists.In this wide-ranging conversation we cover why China’s industry grew; why responsive local governments beat tax holidays; the collapse of the wage gap; how Ethiopia was chosen as a beachhead; and why apparel remains the right first-mover industry for countries not yet on the industrialisation road.
- Aug 12, 202626 min
S7 Ep40: Using mobile phones to support teachers, parents, and students
More households in low-income countries own a mobile phone than have electricity or clean water. So why is education one of the last places it has been put to work?Jenny Aker (Cornell) and Noam Angrist (Oxford) are the academic leads on a J-PAL Policy Insight that reviews 30 studies of mobile phone programmes in education. They tell Tim Phillips that the cheapest option, blasting out SMS messages, is usually the one that fails. But put a real person on the other end of the line, and that's an effective and inexpensive way to improve education. The phone is a platform, Angrist points out, not a pedagogy.The research behind this episode:Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). 2026. "Leveraging Mobile Phones for Learning." J-PAL Policy Insight. Academic leads Jenny Aker and Noam Angrist; insight authors Jessica Williams and Demitria Wack.To cite this episode:Phillips, Tim, Jenny Aker, and Noam Angrist. 2026. "Using mobile phones to support teachers, parents, and students." VoxDev Talks (podcast).About the guestsJenny Aker is the Daniel G. Sisler Professor of Development Economics at Cornell University. She is also a non-resident fellow at the Center for Global Development and co-chair of the Digital Identification and Finance Initiative at J-PAL Africa. Her research spans mobile technology and agricultural markets, adult literacy and numeracy, financial inclusion, and the design of cash transfers and social protection in Africa.Noam Angrist is Academic Director of the What Works Hub for Global Education and Senior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, and co-founder of Youth Impact, one of the largest NGOs scaling health and education programmes backed by randomised trial evidence. His research spans distance education, the measurement of implementation, and how programmes that work in a trial can be made to work at national scale.Research and concepts cited in this episodeOne Laptop per Child. The plan to put a cheap laptop in the hands of every child in the developing world, launched in 2005 and abandoned as evidence of its effect on learning failed to appear. Angrist raises it as the cautionary tale for anyone introducing a device: the schools could not absorb it, the software was an afterthought, and nobody planned for charging or breakage. Phones avoid that problem because they are already there, so the marginal cost of adding good pedagogy is low. A long-term follow up from rural Peru found no positive effect on educational outcomes.Mobile coverage. GSMA. 2025. "The State of Mobile Internet Connectivity 2025." Around 95% of the world's population now lives within range of a broadband network. In sub-Saharan Africa coverage is about 80% and adoption about 60%, and what people mostly hold is a simple handset rather than a smartphone.Phone tutoring in emergencies. Angrist, Noam, Micheal Ainomugisha, Sai Pramod Bathena, Peter Bergman, Colin Crossley, Claire Cullen, Thato Letsomo, Moitshepi Matsheng, Rene Marlon Panti, Shwetlena Sabarwal, and Tim Sullivan. 2023. "Building Resilient Education Systems: Evidence from Large-Scale Randomized Trials in Five Countries." NBER Working Paper 31208, revised 2025. Weekly maths texts combined with live tutoring calls raised test scores by 0.30 to 0.35 standard deviations at an average cost of US$11 per child. SMS on its own moved the needle only where access to learning was already very low.Scaling up without the drop. The first Botswana phone tutoring trial produced an effect of about 0.12 standard deviations; by the fifth replication, in Uganda, Angrist says the effect was over 0.8, and implementation fidelity data improved in step with the order of the studies. He sets this against the voltage drop described by John List in The Voltage Effect (2022), the tendency of programmes to lose their punch as they scale. Common, Angrist argues, but not inevitable.A/B testing the tutoring call. Angrist, Noam, Claire Cullen, and Janica Magat. 2025. "Cheaper (and More Effective) by the Dozen: Evidence from 12 Randomised A/B Tests Optimising Tutoring for Scale." What Works Hub for Global Education Working Paper 20
- Aug 6, 202650 min
S7 Ep39: Ideas in Development: Moving billions to evidence
This is an episode from VoxDev's new podcast series, Ideas in Development. This series has a separate podcast feed, where you can find every episode of Oliver Hanney’s conversations on evidence.YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-e0GAFGaJ0 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/moving-billions-towards-evidence/id1866874059?i=1000772910756 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/12UqCmkB4oLLWqoHpT5Lyt?si=6be55d2c81884d65 Audioboom: https://audioboom.com/posts/8917092-moving-billions-towards-evidence Substack: https://ideasindevelopment.substack.com/p/moving-billions-towards-evidenceIn 2022, Dean Karlan became Chief Economist at USAID, tasked with steering the world's largest bilateral aid agency towards evidence-backed approaches. He left in 2025, as the agency was being dismantled, having moved roughly $1.7 billion of funding in the process.In this episode of Ideas in Development, Dean joins Oliver Hanney to discuss what evidence-based policy actually looks like inside a government institution; how his team picked their battles; why collaboration beat prescription; and where the limits of taking goals as given lie. They also cover the rise of embedded evidence labs in countries like Rwanda and Peru, the synthesis and implementation gaps between academia and policy, and whether there are questions in development economics, like the impacts of cash transfers, on which we now have enough evidence.Dean Karlan is Professor of Economics and Finance at Northwestern University, founder of Innovations for Poverty Action, and former Chief Economist of USAID.
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