Welcome to my webpage!
Starting in the summer of 2024, I'm taking the role of Impact and Learning Manager at the Stanford Impact Labs working on how to measure the potential impact of a diverse portfolio of investments across multiple disciplines aiming to generate social change at scale.
I received my PhD in Economics from Stanford University. My research work broadly studies the challenges faced by low-income countries to develop state capacity. This includes studying decentralization in settings where customary forms of governance co-exist with low-capacity states and policies to improve the human capital and organizational capacity of governments.
My research mostly relies on primary data collection and experimental methods, both for large-scale policy evaluation and field experiments to identify causal mechanisms. I have ongoing projects both in Sierra Leone and Zambia.
References
Katherine Casey (
kecasey@stanford.edu )
Arun Chandrasekhar (
arungc@stanford.edu )
Jeremy Bowles (
jeremy.bowles@ucl.ac.uk )
PhD in Economics, 2024
Stanford University
BA and MS in Economics, 2015/2018
Universidad de los Andes
This paper investigates the relative efficiency of traditional leaders when informally taxing citizens in low-income states and whether this comes at the expense of relatively poor households. I design a field experiment to measure whether citizens engage in costly actions to avoid contributing their labor to a public good. I randomize communities across different methods to select contributors to compare the status quo of chiefs selecting contributors to two alternatives: random lotteries and progressive selection based on household surveys. I use the random selection arm as a benchmark and estimate whether selection by chiefs or progressive selecting are relatively efficient by generating more or less costly behavior from citizens. I also study the heterogenous effects of these treatment arms by household wealth to assess if there is evidence of chiefs being regressive and whether this can be corrected by a simple policy instrument.
Work in progress
Pre 2018 // Post 2018
Pre 2018 // Post 2018