Hunter College Department of Economics and the Public Policy Program at Roosevelt House
present a panel discussion
Experiments in Public Policy
Perspectives on the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics
Tuesday, November 19
5:30pm – 7:00pm
Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute
47-49 East 65th Street
RECEPTION TO FOLLOW
The 2019 Nobel recognizes Esther Duflo, Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty." Join the panelists for a broad-ranging conversation about the praise and the controversies surrounding randomized control trials (RCTs) and how their work changes the conversation about public policy, economic development, and data-driven social science.
Panelists
Karna Basu, Associate Professor, Hunter College & The CUNY Graduate Center
Subha Mani, Associate Professor, Fordham University
Jonathan Morduch, Professor of Public Policy and Economics,
Executive Director of the Financial Access Initiative, NYU
Nouhoum Traore, Ph.D., Economist, World Bank Group, formerly at Innovations for Poverty Action (BA & MA from Hunter College)
Karna Basu is Associate Professor of Economics at Hunter College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. He holds a BA from Yale and a Ph.D. from MIT where he worked with Banerjee and Duflo. Prior to joining Hunter he was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago. He works on topics at the intersection of behavioral economics and development, with a particular focus on informal banking. He has carried out randomized control trial (RCT) field experiments in India and East Indonesia.
Subha Mani is Associate Professor of Economics at Fordham University. She has a BA from the University of Delhi, an MA from Mumbai University, and a PhD from University of Southern California. Her research contributes towards the understanding of programs and policies that improve long-run economic and social well being among children and adults in developing countries. Her current work draws upon empirical evidence from Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Peru and Vietnam.
Jonathan Morduch is Professor of Public Policy and Economics, Executive Director of the Financial Access Initiative, New York University. He holds a BA from Brown University and a Ph.D. from Harvard. He has written extensively on poverty and financial institutions in developing countries and on tensions between achieving social impacts and meeting financial goals in microfinance. He is co-author of Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a day. Morduch is currently chair of the United Nations Committee on Poverty Statistics.
Nouhoum Traore is an economist in Sector Economics & Private Sector Development Vice Presidential Unit at IFC headquarters in Washington, DC. Originally from Mali, Nouhoum holds a B.A./M.A. in economics from Hunter College, a Master’s degree in public policy from Harvard, and a Ph.D. in Applied Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He worked at Social Protection & Labor Global Practice and Poverty & Equity & Agriculture Global Practice at the World Bank. Prior to joining the World Bank Group, Nouhoum worked as a program manager at the International Food Policy Research (IFPRI) and a project coordinator at Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) where he worked on the design and implementation of several impact evaluations in Mali, Kenya, and Uganda using the RCTs methodology. His current research examines constraints to firm performance and determinants of entrepreneurship and rural poverty in Africa.