Dean Karlan | |
---|---|
Nationality | American |
Academic career | |
Institution | Northwestern University (2017–present)
Yale University (2005–17) Princeton University (2002–05) |
Doctoral advisor | Abhijit Banerjee[1] Esther Duflo[1] |
Information at IDEAS / RePEc |
Dean Karlan is an American development economist. He is Chief Economist of USAID and Professor of Economics and Finance at Northwestern University[2] where, alongside Christopher Udry, he co-founded and co-directs the Global Poverty Research Lab at Kellogg School of Management.[3] Karlan is the president and founder of Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), a New Haven, Connecticut, based research outfit dedicated to creating and evaluating solutions to social and international development problems.[4] He is also a Research Fellow and member of the Executive Committee of the board of directors at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[5] Along with economists Jonathan Morduch and Sendhil Mullainathan, Karlan served as director of the Financial Access Initiative (FAI), a consortium of researchers focused on substantially expanding access to quality financial services for low-income individuals.
On 15 of November 2022 he was nominated USAID Chief Economist [1]
Together with Abhijit Banerjee,[6] Esther Duflo, Michael Kremer,[7] John A. List,[8] and Sendhil Mullainathan,[9] he has been a driving force in advancing field experiments as an important methodology to discover causal relationships in economics. He is also a co-founder of stickK.com and co-founder of ImpactMatters, which, counter to other evaluators which focus on overhead costs, instead prioritized cost-effectiveness analysis.[10]