Development economics is a branch of economics that deals with economic aspects of the development process in low- and middle- income countries. Its focus is not only on methods of promoting economic development, economic growth and structural change but also on improving the potential for the mass of the population, for example, through health, education and workplace conditions, whether through public or private channels.
James Bradford "Brad" DeLong is an American economic historian who has been a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley since 1993.
Richard M. Ebeling is an American libertarian author who was the president of the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) from 2003 to 2008. Ebeling is currently the BB&T Distinguished Professor of Ethics and Free Enterprise Leadership at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina.
Roland Gerhard Fryer Jr. is an American economist and professor at Harvard University.
The Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, soon to be renamed Watson School for International and Public Affairs, is an interdisciplinary research center at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Its mission is to promote a just and peaceful world through research, teaching, and public engagement. The institute's research focuses on three main areas: development, security, and governance. Its faculty include anthropologists, economists, political scientists, sociologists, and historians, as well as journalists and other practitioners.
David Matthew Cutler is an American economist who is the Otto Eckstein Professor of Applied Economics at Harvard University. He was given a five-year term appointment of Harvard College Professor, which recognizes excellence in undergraduate teaching. He holds a joint appointment in the economics department and at Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard School of Public Health, is a faculty member for the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies, and serves as commissioner on the Massachusetts Health Policy Commission.
Edward Ludwig Glaeser is an American economist who is currently the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard University, where he is also the Chairman of the Department of Economics. He directs the Cities Research Programme at the International Growth Centre.
Sharon Monica Oster was an American economist. She was the Frederic D. Wolfe Professor Emerita of Management and Entrepreneurship and the dean of Yale School of Management, where she was the first woman to receive tenure, and the first female dean. She was widely known as an economist focusing on business strategy and non-profit organization management.
Robert Costanza is an American/Australian ecological economist and Professor at the UCL Institute for Global Prosperity, University College London. He is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and a Full Member of the Club of Rome.
Emily Fair Oster is an American economist who has served as the Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence at Brown University since 2019, where she has been a professor of economics since 2015. Her research interests span from development economics and health economics to research design and experimental methodology. Her research was brought to the attention of non-economists through the Wall Street Journal, the book SuperFreakonomics, and her 2007 TED Talk.
Alberto Francesco Alesina was an Italian economist who was the Nathaniel Ropes Professor of Political Economy at Harvard University from 2003 until his death in 2020. He was known principally as an economist of politics and culture, and was famed for his usage of economic tools to study social and political issues. He was described as having “almost single-handedly” established the modern field of political economy, and as a likely contender for the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
Nadarajan "Raj" Chetty is an Indian-American economist who is the William A. Ackman Professor of Public Economics at Harvard University. Some of Chetty's recent papers have studied equality of opportunity in the United States and the long-term impact of teachers on students' performance. Offered tenure at the age of 28, Chetty became one of the youngest tenured faculty in the history of Harvard's economics department. He is a recipient of the John Bates Clark Medal and a 2012 MacArthur Fellow. Currently, he is also an advisory editor of the Journal of Public Economics. In 2020, he was awarded the Infosys Prize in Economics, the highest monetary award recognizing achievements in science and research, in India.
Amy Nadya Finkelstein is an American economist who is a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the co-director and research associate of the Public Economics Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the co-Scientific Director of J-PAL North America.
Miles Spencer Kimball is an American economist who is currently the Eugene D. Eaton Jr. Professor of Economics at the University of Colorado Boulder. From 1987 to 2016, he was professor of economics and research professor of survey research at the University of Michigan. He is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economics Research. He is a columnist for the online international business magazine Quartz, where his column coauthored with Noah Smith, "There is one key difference between kids who excel at math and those who don't" was the second most popular article in 2013. Other popular columns have focused on education, immigration policy, how to get into PhD programs in economics, geopolitics, gay marriage, sexism in economics, the Reinhart and Rogoff controversy and negative interest rates. On his blog, "Confessions of a Supply Side Liberal," he has been an advocate for eliminating the zero lower bound on nominal interest rates in order to make deep negative interest rates a viable monetary policy option. Three former Federal Reserve officials, Don Kohn, Ben Bernanke and Narayana Kocherlakota, can be seen discussing his proposal for eliminating the lower bound on interest rates here. Many of his blog posts have been translated into Japanese and some into Thai. Kimball is a Unitarian-Universalist lay preacher after having departed from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints around the age of 40. He has a special interest outside his professional field of economics in the fields of nutrition and fasting.
Mark McGann Blyth is a Scottish-American political economist. He is currently the William R. Rhodes Professor of International Economics and Professor of International and Public Affairs at Brown University. At Brown, Blyth additionally directs the William R. Rhodes Center for International Economics and Finance at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.
Matthew Gentzkow is an American economist and a professor of economics at Stanford University. Previously, he was the Richard O. Ryan Professor of Economics and Neubauer Family Faculty Fellow at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. He was awarded the 2014 John Bates Clark Medal. He was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.
Heidi Williams is a Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College and Director of Science Policy at the Institute for Progress. She is a graduate of Dartmouth College, and earned her MSc in development economics from Oxford University and her PhD in Economics from Harvard University. Prior to Dartmouth, Williams was the Charles R. Schwab Professor of Economics at Stanford University and an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is a member of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Nancy Qian is a Chinese American economist and currently serves as the James J. O'Connor Professor of economics at the Kellogg School of Management MEDS and a Professor by Courtesy at the Department of Economics at Northwestern University. Her research interests include development economics, political economy and economic history. She is a leading development economist and an expert of autocracies and the Chinese economy.
Isaiah Andrews is an American economist who is a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is also a co-editor of the American Economic Review. In 2018, The Economist named him one of the 8 "best young economists of the decade." He was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2020 and in 2021, the American Economic Association awarded him the John Bates Clark Medal.
In economics and game theory, Bayesian persuasion involves a situation where one participant wants to persuade the other of a certain course of action. There is an unknown state of the world, and the sender must commit to a decision of what information to disclose to the receiver. Upon seeing said information, the receiver will revise their belief about the state of the world using Bayes' Rule and select an action. Bayesian persuasion was introduced by Kamenica and Gentzkow, though its origins can be traced back to Aumann and Maschler (1995).
