Karla Hoff teaches behavioral development economics at Columbia University and is working on a book, Malleable Minds: A New Perspective on What Makes Economic and Social Progress Possible. She was Co-Director of the World Development Report 2015 and served in the World Bank's Development Research Group from 1999-2020. She has published papers in the American Economic Review that explain how segregation between renters and homeowners may deepen poverty, how cueing a stigmatized social identity (low caste in India) depresses cognitive performance, and how Big Bang privatization in post-Soviet states impeded the emergence of a political demand for rule of law.