Austin is an Associate Professor at Bates College and was previously an Assistant and Associate Professor at Miami University (Ohio). He is an empirical microeconomist working on policy questions in the health, education, and labor-market sphere. His current research projects examine the impact of compensation structure on employee output, occupational licensing, and factors affecting the academic performance and early career outcomes of college students. He enjoys hiking, kayaking, and exploring the outdoors with family.

Dr. Abu S. Shonchoy is currently a tenured Associate Professor of Economics at Florida International University (FIU) and an affiliated professor at MIT's Jameel Poverty Action Lab. He also holds fellowship positions with the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) and the Global Labor Organization (GLO). Dr. Shonchoy is an applied economist with interest in issues of global development. He has a wide range of experience conducting field research and experiments in South Asia and West Africa. He has been engaged in more than 15 RCTs in the field of infrastructure, financial inclusion, labor market, and education in developing countries. His papers appeared in peer-reviewed international journals, including the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, Journal of Development Economics, Journal of Public Economics, as well as interdisciplinary journals such as Nature Scientific Reports, to name a few. His research has been highlighted in international and local news outlets such as BBC World, ABC Net, TVS Japan, and other media outlets worldwide. His current works have been showcased in the Global Development Blog and World Bank Research Digest. Dr. Shonchoy received several awards and recognitions, including Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship, Neil Vousden Memorial Scholarship and CDESG Best Paper Award.

I am Mamidipudi Ramakrishna Sharan, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at the University of Maryland, College Park.

My research centres around questions in development economics and political economy. I have worked as a researcher and policy economist, with research organizations, state governments and the central government in India. I was awarded my PhD from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government in May 2020. Subsequently, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Global Development

Dr. Gitanjali Sen is a Professor, at the Department of Economics, Shiv Nadar Institution of Eminence, India. She specializes in Development Economics and is working in Applied Microeconomics areas that are relevant to public policy. Her research interest is in areas of inclusive development, particularly access to education, health, employment, finance, and their role in the study of poverty and inequality. Some of her current works include the study of early life health and its connection to later life outcomes, school education and higher education, access to health and labor market outcomes. Earlier, she has also worked in areas of child labor and returns to education. She has published in internationally acclaimed journals like World Development, Journal of Population Economics, Journal of Human Capital, Feminist Economics, PLOS One, Population Research and Policy Review, The Journal of Development Studies, Environment and Development Economics, and the Economic and Political Weekly.

Ashish Kumar Sedai is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Department of Economics, College of Business, University of Texas at Arlington. He completed a Ph.D. in Economics at Colorado State University (CSU) in 2022, master's in economics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, India and worked as an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Delhi from 2012-2017. He currently is a Research Associate at the Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis, Australian National University and is a contractor for development research at the Asian Development Bank Institute. He specializes in labor, health, gender, and development research and has received the prestigious Warren Samuel’s prize from the Association for Social Economics for his research on “Gendered effects of piped water in India". Other notable works include the analysis of electrification in developing economies and its impact on household welfare and women empowerment, informal finance and women empowerment, political institutions and pollution, care shocks and time use. His research papers have been published in Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Energy Economics, World Development, The Energy Journal, Economics of Ageing, Journal of South Asian Development, and Economic and Political Weekly. He has also worked as a consultant, specializing in applied economic development research for the World Bank, United Nations and 2M Research.

Sudipta Sarangi is the Department Head and Professor of Economics at Virginia Tech (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University). Prior to joining Virginia Tech, he has been a Distinguished Professor of Business Administration at Louisiana State University and a Program Director at the National Science Foundation. His research interests range from network theory to experimental and behavioural economics. He is a research associate of DIW Berlin, GATE, University of Lyon-St. Etienne, and the Lima School of Economics. He has been a consultant to organizations like the World Bank and FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization). He currently serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Journal of Public Economic Theory and Studies in Microeconomics. He is the author of Economics of Small Things.

Spent 4 years in academia and 5 years in private sector now. When I started in my PhD program I was the only out economist I knew although I had heard of 2 others who I had never met.

Stephen L Ross, Syracuse University (PhD 1984), is a professor of Economics at the University of Connecticut and a Research Associate in the National Bureau of Economic Research Education Program. His research focuses on the experiences of disadvantaged groups, especially African-Americans, in U.S. cities including studying peer effects and social interactions, neighborhood effects, residential and school segregation, housing and mortgage lending discrimination, urban labor markets, primary and secondary education and racial profiling. His work has been published in Journal of Political Economy, Review of Economics and Statistics, Economic Journal, American Economic Journals: Economic Policy and Applied Economics, Review of Financial Studies, Social Problems, Social Science Research and Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, as well as his book Color of Credit by MIT Press. His work has been funded by the Institute for Education Sciences, National Institute for Child Health and Development, Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Ford, MacArthur, WT Grant and FannieMae Foundations. He has been appointed to Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Global Working Group (University of Chicago), Penn Institute for Urban Research (University of Pennsylvania) and Center for Financial Security (University of Wisconsin-Madison). He is a Co-editor for Regional Science and Urban Economics and Education Finance and Policy and serves on editorial boards of American Economic Journal: Economic Policy and many journals within urban economics. He has consulted for National Resource Council (National Academy of Science), Urban Institute, National Consumer Law Center, New York State Attorney General, FannieMae, Abt Associates, and K&L Gates.

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 of economics at Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM).

I was born and raised in Colombia, where I earned a B.A. in economics (summa cum laude) and a B.A. in mathematics (cum laude) from Universidad de los Andes. I did a Ph.D. in economics at the University of California, San Diego. I have affiliations at the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), Experiments in Governance and Politics (EGAP), the Center for Global Development (CGD), and The Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD).

My work focuses on the bottlenecks that impede high-quality government provision of education, health care, and environmental protection. In conjunction with my empirical research agenda, I work on methodological issues in applied econometrics and statistics.