I am a PhD candidate in Economics at Fordham University. My main fields of research interests are international trade and development, applied econometrics and applied microeconomics. I am writing my dissertation on the impact of a trade policy reform on the exports from developing countries. My current research agenda is twofold. First, I aim to provide data driven impact estimates to aid the trade policy dialogue between developing and developed countries. And second, acknowledging that even the most development friendly international trade rules need to be backed by sound domestic policy reforms, I aim to investigate the role of state capacity in facilitating trade and investment.

Karen Ortiz-Becerra is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Agricultural and Resource
Economics at the University of California, Davis. Her research interests include Development Economics, Political Economy, and Applied Econometrics. Karen studies the implications of agricultural development and land consolidation on rural labor markets. She also conducts research on empirical methods with a special focus on field experiments and causal inference.

Christopher Oconnor is 4th year Economics PhD student at The University of Alabama. Before starting his PhD studies, he worked for 4 years at a policy research institute in Jamaica where he worked as a poverty and inequality economist. This experience has led him into the field of Development Economics, which is his main area of specialization for his PhD. His research is focused on issues surrounding individual vulnerability to, and resilience against, welfare shortfalls. As a part of his dissertation, he also does some research in experimental and public economics.

I am currently a 2nd-year PhD student in economics at Bocconi University, Italy. I am interested in applied micro and try to answer questions in development and environmental economics using micro data including satellite imagery and digitized textual data. In a recent paper, I use high-resolution satellite data combined with two natural experiments to access the  role of incentives and penalties in curbing agricultural fires

Born in 1989 in Volta Region of Ghana, Angela Cindy Emefa Mensah holds a Bachelor of Education in Social Science (Economics and Mathematics) from the University of Cape Coast and received a Master of Philosophy (MPhil) in Economics from
the University of Ghana. She worked as a research assistant in the United Nations University’s World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) office at the University of Ghana. She is a member of the African Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (AFAERE). Her research interests are within the field of Natural resources and environmental economics and empirical econometric analysis. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Economics at Colorado State Universit

My name is Sultan Mehmood. My research interests are in development economics and political economy. Particularly, my research seeks to understand the conditions for establishment of Rule of Law in societies and its consequences for institutional design and development

Yoonjung Kim is a fourth-year PhD student in economics at the University of California-Irvine. She works in the fields of labor and public economics, with a particular focus on the impacts of public assistance programs on outcomes such as labor supply decisions, household consumption, and food security. In current projects, she is studying the effects of public pension reforms in South Korea, the impacts of expanding cash welfare under TANF in the U.S., and the effects of the introduction of universal free lunch in South Korean schools

MinSub Kim is a PhD candidate in Economics at The Ohio State University. His primary fields of research are labor economics with a particular emphasis on gender disparities and social networks. He has focused on studying coworker networks within the workplace to understand how manager-employee connections affect employee productivity and workforce diversity.

Fatima is a final year PhD candidate at the University of New South Wales with a focus in behavioural and development economics. She is currently working on a randomized control trial to assess the impact of a positive psychology intervention on improving learning outcomes for school age children in low-income settings. Fatima also works as a Policy Analyst at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Population Ageing Research in Sydney. She received her MSc in Economic History from the London School of Economics in 2016 and her BSc (Hons) in Economics from the Lahore University of Management Sciences in 2015.

Ajinkya Keskar is currently a Ph.D. student at Rice University. Before pursuing his Ph.D., he received a Master's in economics at the University of Wisconsin Madison and a Bachelor's in Electronics and Communications Engineering from PES University, Bangalore, India. Ajinkya's research interest is primarily development economics, focusing on the economics of the family, gender, and marriage markets. Some of his recent work looks at the effect of marriage transfers on women's post-marital outcomes in India.