Rachel Glennerster | |
---|---|
Born | 21 October 1965 |
Nationality | British |
Academic career | |
Field | Development economics |
Alma mater | Somerville College, Oxford Birkbeck College, University of London |
Rachel Glennerster CMG (born 21 October 1965) [1] is a British economist. She is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. [2] She has been announced as the new president for the Center for Global Development, starting in September 2024. [3]
Between 2018 and 2021 she served as chief economist for the Department for International Development and the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. [4]
Glennerster received her bachelor's of arts degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from Oxford University in 1988, where she was a member of Somerville College. [1] She then obtained a master's degree in Economics from Birkbeck College, University of London in 1995 and a doctorate in economics from the same institution in 2004. [1]
Between 1988 and 1994, Glennerster worked as an economic adviser to HM Treasury in the UK government. [1] She was a member of the UK delegation to the IMF and World Bank from 1994 to 1996, [5] and a development associate at the Harvard Institute for International Development in 1996-97. [1]
In 1997, Glennerster joined the International Monetary Fund (IMF), first as an economist and then as a senior economist, where she stayed until 2004. [1] In her thirties, from 2000 to 2004, she also taught at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government as an adjunct lecturer. [6]
From 2004 to 2017, Glennerster was executive director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). [7] [1] She was also the co-chair of J-PAL's agriculture sector program between 2004 and 2014, and has been the education sector co-chair since 2014.
In 2010, she became the lead academic for Sierra Leone at the International Growth Centre, a research centre based jointly at The London School of Economics and Political Science and the University of Oxford. [8] [1]
In 2018, Glennerster joined the Department for International Development, [9] [10] [4] the UK's ministry for international development cooperation, as chief economist. In 2020, following the department's merger with the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office), she became their chief economist, a role she fulfilled until July 2021. She also sat on the Independent Advisory Committee on Development Impact and the executive committee. [11] [12]
In 2021, Glennerster joined the University of Chicago as Associate Professor of Economics in the Division of Social Science. [2]
In 2023, Glennerster joined the Board of Trustees of Our World in Data, an open-access scientific publication focused on the world’s largest problems. [13]
In May 2024, the Center for Global Development announced that Glennerster would be its next president, starting September 2024. [3] She succeeded Masood Ahmed, who had led the organization for seven years. The Center for Global Development is a nonprofit think tank based in Washington, D.C., focused on international development.
In 2007, Glennerster helped establish the Deworm the World Initiative, a program that targets increased access to education and improved health from the elimination of intestinal worms for at-risk children and has helped "deworm" millions of children worldwide. [14] [15]
She has been a member of Giving What We Can, an effective altruism organization whose members pledge to give 10% of their income to effective charities. [16] She joined the initiative at its inception in 2009. [17]
Glennerster's areas of research includes and focuses on randomized trials of health, education, microcredit, women’s empowerment, and governance. Geographically, her research has spanned West Africa and South Asia, including countries such as Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone, Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. [18]
Findings of her research include:
Glennerster is the coauthor of Running Randomized Evaluations, a book on running randomized impact evaluations in practice in developing countries, and Strong Medicine: Creating Incentives for Pharmaceutical Research on Neglected Diseases, a book that strategizes incentives for developers to undertake the costly research needed to develop vaccines. [5]
Together with Michael Kremer she also authored the book Small Changes, Big Results: Behavioral Economics at Work in Poor Countries.
Glennerster was appointed Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) in the 2021 New Year Honours for services to international development. [23]
She is cited as among the top 2% of female economists as of June 2024, according to IDEAS/RePEC. [24]
Michael Robert Kremer is an American development economist currently serving as University Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago and Director of the Development Innovation Lab at the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics. Kremer formerly served as the Gates Professor of Developing Societies at Harvard University, a role he held from 2003 to 2020. In 2019, Kremer was jointly awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, together with Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty."
Esther Duflo, FBA is a French–American economist currently serving as the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 2019, she was jointly awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences alongside Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty".
Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) is an American non-profit research and policy organization founded in 2002 by economist Dean Karlan. Since its foundation, IPA has worked with over 400 leading academics to conduct over 900 evaluations in 52 countries. The organization also manages the Poverty Probability Index.
The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) is a global research center based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology aimed to reducing poverty by ensuring that policy is informed by rigorous, scientific evidence. J-PAL funds, provides technical support to, and disseminates the results of randomized controlled trials evaluating the efficacy of social interventions in health, education, agriculture, and a range of other fields. As of 2020, the J-PAL network consisted of 500 researchers and 400 staff, and the organization's programs had impacted over 400 million people globally. The organization has regional offices in seven countries around the world, and is headquartered near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
3Dean Karlan is an American development economist and social entrepreneur currently serving as chief economist of the United States Agency for International Development. Alongside his role at USAID, he is the Frederic Esser Nemmers Distinguished Professor of Economics and Finance at Northwestern University where, alongside Christopher Udry, he co-directs the Globe Poverty Research Lab at the Kellogg School of Management.
Jonathan Zinman is a professor of economics at Dartmouth College and a research affiliate at the New Haven-based research outfit Innovations for Poverty Action and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology-based Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab. Formerly an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Zinman is currently a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia and Fellow at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation Center for Financial Research. Zinman is also a member of the Behavioral Finance Forum and a Research Advisory Board member of stickK, a web-based start-up that enables users to make commitment contracts in order to reach their personal goals.
Stefan Nicolaas Dercon,, is a Belgian-British economist and a Professor of Economic Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government and the Department of Economics at the University of Oxford. He is also the Director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies.
The International Growth Centre (IGC) is an economic research centre based at the London School of Economics, operated in partnership with University of Oxford's Blavatnik School of Government.
The Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA), earlier known as the Center of Evaluation for Global Action, is a research network based at the University of California that advances global health and development through impact evaluation and economic analysis. The Center's researchers use randomized controlled trials and other rigorous forms of evaluation to promote sustainable social and economic development around the world.
Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty (2011) is a non-fiction book by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, both professors of Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences laureates. The book reports on the effectiveness of solutions to global poverty using an evidence-based randomized control trial approach. It won the 2011 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.
Edward "Ted" Andrew Miguel is an American development economist currently serving as the Oxfam Professor of Environmental and Resource Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the founder and faculty director of the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA), a Berkeley-based hub for research on development economics.
Christopher Blattman is a Canadian-American economist and political scientist working on conflict, crime, and international development. He is the Ramalee E. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy Studies and The Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts. He is active on Twitter as well as an early blogger on international economics and politics. He is the author of Why We Fight: The Roots of War and the Paths to Peace, published by Viking Press in 2022.
Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak is a Bangladeshi economist and a professor of economics at Yale University. He is a co-chair of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab's (J-PAL) Urban Services Initiative and its Environment and Energy sector, as well as the lead academic for Bangladesh at the International Growth Centre (IGC). His research interests concentrate on environmental issues in developing countries.
Jeanne Lafortune is a Canadian economist who currently works as an Full Professor in Economics and Director of Research at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. She is also a researcher at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, which is a global research center that aims to reduce poverty and improve life quality of people in the Caribbean and Latin America. Lafortune holds a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her research interests focus on three main fields, including economic history, family and development economics.
Marcella Alsan is an American physician and economist at Harvard University. She is known for her works in the field of health inequality and development economics. She is currently a professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and was previously an associate professor of medicine at Stanford University. She uses randomized evaluations and historical public health natural experiments to study how infectious disease, human capital, and economic outcomes interact. She has studied the effects of the Tuskegee Syphills Experiment on health care utilization and mortality among Black men. Alsan was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2021.
Tavneet Suri is a Kenyan development economist currently serving as the Louis E. Seley Professor of Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. She is a member of the executive committee of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, and a faculty research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Her research focuses on technology adoption and usage in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Emily Louise Breza is an American development economist currently serving as the Frederic E. Abbe Professor of Economics at Harvard University. She is a board member at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, and an affiliated researcher at the International Growth Centre and National Bureau of Economic Research. Breza's primary research interests are in development economics, in particular the interplay between social networks and household finance. She is the recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship.
Oeindrila Dube is an economist and political scientist serving as the Philip K. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies at the University of Chicago, Harris School of Public Policy. She is a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and co-director of the Crime, Violence, and Conflict Initiative at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab. Her research examines the political economy of conflict and development, with a regional focus on Africa and Latin America.
Evidence Action is an American non-profit organization founded in 2013 that scales cost-effective development interventions with rigorous evidence supporting their efficacy. The organization operates four main programs: the Deworm the World Initiative, Safe Water Now, Equal Vitamin Access, and Syphilis-Free Start. It also operates an Accelerator program, whereby new development interventions are screened and scaled according to efficacy. Vox Media has described Evidence Action as taking a "VC approach to development work".
Katharina Hauck is a British economist who is a professor and deputy director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Institute for Disease and Emergency Analytics at Imperial College London. Her research concentrates on the economics of infectious diseases and how public health interventions and pandemic preparedness impact economies.