Technology

Dean Karlan is a Research Fellow at CERP. He is the Frederic Esser Nemmers Distinguished Professor of Economics and Finance at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and Co-Director of the Buffett Institute’s Global Poverty Research Lab. He is the Founder of Innovations for Poverty Action, a non-profit organisation dedicated to discovering and promoting solutions to global poverty problems, and working to scale up successful ideas through implementation and dissemination to policymakers, practitioners, investors and donors. Dr Dean is also on the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors of the M.I.T. Jameel Poverty Action Lab. In 2015, he co-founded (with Elijah Goldberg) Impact Matters, a non-profit dedicated to producing impact audits, which assesses whether an organisation uses and produces appropriate evidence of impact. His research focuses on microeconomic issues of poverty, typically employing experimental methodologies and behavioural economics insights to examine what works, what does not, and why in interventions in sustainable income generation for those in poverty, household and entrepreneurial finance, health behaviour, and charitable giving. He works on issues for low-income households in both developing countries and the United States. He has worked in over twenty countries around the world, including both low-income countries and also the United States. As a social entrepreneur, he co-founded stickK.com, a website that uses lessons from behavioral economics to help people reach personal goals, such as weight loss and smoking cessation, through commitment contracts. In 2020 he co-authored the third edition of an economics principles textbook, Economics. In 2018 he co-authored The Goldilocks Challenge: Right-Fit Evidence for the Social Sector and in 2016 he co-authored Failing in the Field; In 2011, Dr Dean co-authored More Than Good Intentions: How a New Economics is Helping to Solve Global Poverty. Dr Dean received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He was awarded distinguished alumni awards from the University of Chicago Booth Graduate School of Business and the Duke University Talent Identification Program. Previously Karlan was the Samuel C Park, Jr Professor of Economics at Yale University, and Assistant Professor of Economics at Princeton University. He received a PhD in Economics from M.I.T., an M.B.A. and an M.P.P. from the University of Chicago, and a B.A. in International Affairs from the University of Virginia.