Willa Friedman is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Houston. She completed a PhD in Economics at UC Berkeley and a Bachelors in Social Studies at Harvard. She was previously a Fellow at the Office of Evaluation Sciences and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Global Development. Before her PhD, she worked with International Child Support/Innovations for Poverty Action in Busia, Kenya. She uses field and natural experiments to understand how people make decisions about their own, their family's, and others' well-being, and how these decisions shape the ultimate impact of policies considered. This has included designing, managing, and analyzing the effects of large RCTs and natural experiments in Ghana, Mali, Kenya, South Africa, Burkina Faso, Tanzania, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Rwanda.

Dr. Sandip Datta is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi. His research lies at the intersection of development economics, education economics, and health economics, with a broader interest in public policy and human development. His work has been published in leading international journals, including the World Bank Economic Review, Journal of Development Studies, Oxford Development Studies, and Social Science & Medicine, among others. His current research focuses on issues related to education, health, and economic development, with particular emphasis on evidence-based policy analysis in developing countries.

Dr. Ashish K. Sedai is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Texas at Arlington and a Visiting Fellow at SIEPR (Fall 2025). His research examines household finance, financial inclusion, gender, and infrastructure in low- and middle-income countries, using quasi-experimental designs and randomized evaluations. His work appears in the European Economic Review, World Bank Economic Review, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Energy Economics, and World Development, among others; current projects include nationwide bank-expansion effects and RCTs on fractionalization, labor outcomes, and WASH. He holds a PhD in Economics from Colorado State University.

Deepthi Sara Anil is a postdoctoral associate at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS), Cornell University. Her research interests lie at the intersection of development economics, health, and the environment in low- and middle-income countries, with a particular focus on India. Anil received her PhD in economic sciences from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. Her doctoral thesis focused on the role of production relations, such as social networks, norms, and public trust, in human capital investment decisions. Anil is an affiliate with the Global Labor Organization (GLO).

I am Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics at the University of Delaware. I am also a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)-Families and Children program. Previously, I was an Assistant Professor at Rutgers-Newark Department of Economics, UC Irvine School of Education, and a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Department of Economics and Center of Health and Wellbeing at Princeton University. I received a B.A. and M.A. in Economics from the Universidad de los Andes, Bogota, Colombia and a Ph.D. in Public Policy from the University of Chicago.

My research interests lie in the fields of human capital, health, and development economics. My main line of research examines the impacts and interactions of different social interventions and family investments in the process of human capital formation in the short and long-term, and whether these effects translate to the next generation. Another area of my research studies the link between environmental factors and human capital outcomes across the life cycle.

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Mississippi.

My work focuses on heterogeneous agent macroeconomic models, with particular emphasis on firm R&D investment over the business cycle.

Prior to joining the faculty at Ole Miss I obtained my PhD from The Ohio State University, before which I worked for a boutique economic consultancy specialising in antitrust (leading teams on cases such as Google / Waze, Dow / DuPont, and Huntsman / Sachtleben).

Dr. Sandra Trejos is a Professor of Economics and Past Assistant Chair for the Business, Economics and Communication Department at Pennsylvania Western University (PennWest) - Clarion Campus and a Costa Rican native who became U.S. citizen in 2018. She has been part of the Faculty at PennWest since 2004 where she received tenure and promotion to full professorship in 2009. Nationally, Dr. Trejos received the Outstanding Latina Faculty: Service/Teaching in Higher Education Award at the 2014 American Association of Hispanics in Higher Education (A.A.H.H.E) Conference in Costa Mesa, California. She earned the 2009 Clarion University Outstanding Faculty Equity Award, and the 2010 Clarion University Faculty of the Year award at the Student-Athlete Luncheon.

In the economics profession, she is part of the American Society of Hispanic Economists, officially recognized by the American Economic Association as one of the affiliated organizations of the Allied Social Science Association (A.S.S.A.), and the Pennsylvania Economic Association (P.E.A.) where she served as the 2011-2012 Vice-President of Publicity, the 2012-013 Vice-president of Program and Proceedings and the 2013-2014 President Designate. She presided the P.E.A. during the 2014-2015 period. She has been a mentor for the Diversity Initiative for Tenure in Economics (D.I.T.E) housed at Duke University, the American Economic Association Summer Program – Pipeline Conference and the Association for Mentoring and Inclusion in Economics (A.M.I.E.).

Dr. Trejos has received multiple grants for research and professional development at both the college and the university levels throughout the years and was the principal investigator for a grant by the Pennsylvania System of Higher Education. She has been a reviewer for different publication outlets and has presented at conferences nationally and internationally. She has also served as external reviewer for colleagues in the field and has done work for Pearson Publishing and published scholarly work in several peer-reviewed journals in the fields of economic education (as inspired by classroom-based research), international economics, and economic development. Lately, she has worked in the field of happiness economics.

Finally, Dr. Trejos served as judge for the Pennsylvania Junior Academy of Science (P.J.A.S) for six years at both the regional and state levels.

Jayash Paudel is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Oklahoma and a Co-Director at the Center for Peace and Development. He serves as the Managing Editor of World Development Perspectives and an Associate Editor of Energy Economics. His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, among others. He received a B.A. in Mathematical Economics from Colorado College, and a Ph.D. in Resource Economics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Dr. Elisa Taveras is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (UTRGV). Her research primarily focuses on labor, gender, and household economics, and also examines topics in education, development, and political economics. She is interested in how demographic characteristics, human capital investments, and fertility choices affect individuals' and households' decision-making, and how these choices and outcomes are shaped by cultural factors, gender norms, and public policies.

I am an associate professor of economics at the New Economic School in Moscow. I received my Ph.D. in Economics from France. Previously, I studied in the Netherlands, Italy, and Pakistan. 

My primary fields are Development Economics and Political Economy, and I use natural and field experiments to study how law, politics, and history shape economic development.

I study some of the central questions in development and political economy: how states build capacity, how courts constrain power, and why weak institutions persist. My work uses large-scale data, field experiments, and historical evidence to understand these institutional forces and what, if anything, can change them.