Postdoc Spotlight: Megan Lang, J-PAL '24, on her research journey at J-PAL Global

In our new postdoc alumni spotlight series, we spoke with Megan Lang, J-PAL '24, about her experience as a postdoctoral researcher at J-PAL Global.

What drew you to the field of development, and in particular energy and the environment? What questions have motivated your research? 

My path to development really came through an interest in human rights and international relations, which I studied as an undergrad. As I started to understand the role that economic deprivation has played both as a weapon in conflicts and as a result of conflict, I came to appreciate the importance of development. 

I stumbled into studying solar home systems during grad school when I rented a room in a house in Kigali where some of the other tenants were working at one of the new solar companies in Rwanda. They were interested in understanding their data better and experimenting to see what worked. At the time I knew that the literature on electrification in low-income countries was fairly pessimistic (it still is)—low demand for electricity from households that makes them unprofitable to serve. I thought working with the solar company was a great opportunity to really push and see whether the pessimism was warranted or whether we could understand the types of frictions at play in these markets, design better contracts, and try to find more feasible paths to universal energy access. Those are still the types of questions that motivate my work on energy. 

What was your motivation for doing a PhD and what attracted you to do a postdoc at J-PAL? 

I had a little exposure to research in development economics as an undergraduate, and the rigor really appealed to me. I wanted the tools to better understand poverty and development in a very concrete sense, so going to Berkeley’s Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics was a very natural fit. The post-doc at J-PAL was really motivated by my supervisor and J-PAL affiliated professor Kelsey Jack, and J-PAL’s King Climate Action Initiative (K-CAI). At the time, there were relatively few faculty working on energy in Africa and she was one of them, so I was excited to spend a year working with her. I was also excited to try to help promote more work at the intersection of environment and development, which is central to K-CAI’s work.

You were a postdoc with the K-CAI through J-PAL Global, though you were based at UC Santa Barbara (UCSB). What excited you most about working with K-CAI and what are some things you learned from that experience? 

Being at J-PAL Global during one of the first few years of K-CAI was a great way to be exposed to some of the big questions in environment and development. Coming out of the PhD, it’s really easy to be focused on publishing your dissertation chapters and moving things along in your research pipeline that you lose sight of where the field is moving and what the most important questions are. I still spent a lot of time in the weeds of my papers that year, but I left the postdoc with a much higher-quality set of questions in mind for future work. I also benefited from sitting at UCSB because there are so many incredible environmental economists there. I left being much more balanced in terms of my grasp of environmental versus development economics.  

What resources and networks were available to you while at J-PAL and how did you use them? 

I benefited directly from some of the financial resources available for pilot projects and travel for exploratory work. The biggest benefit for me was the K-CAI network, both in terms of faculty I met with and other K-CAI postdocs I started collaborations with. Since I went on the job market during Covid-19, I didn’t get the same benefits of rapidly expanding my professional network that PhD students typically get through in-person interviews and presentations—it’s just harder to remember faces you see on a screen! Having the postdoc year and the benefit of J-PAL’s network was very helpful for meeting people, learning about their work, and introducing them to mine.

You’ve since taken your talents to the Sustainability and Infrastructure unit in the Development Research Group at the World Bank as a development economist. Could you tell us about your new role? How did your time at J-PAL help prepare you for it? 

My role now is somewhat similar to a faculty role in the sense that I have quite a bit of time for research and that my path to promotion depends on my publication record, but rather than teaching I spend part of my time providing support to different units within the World Bank. One of the requests I will sometimes get is to synthesize existing evidence for practitioners or policymakers—that’s where having a grasp on the big questions at the intersection of development and energy/environment is really critical. From that perspective, the postdoc at J-PAL was a great transition because it helped me understand what those questions are and who is working on them.

What advice would you give PhD students who might be interested in pursuing a postdoc at J-PAL and/or a career in line with yours? 

For PhD students in the energy and development space, it’s worth thinking about combining administrative data with randomized evaluations. As a PhD student, it’s risky to design a project that relies on getting enough grant funding to collect your own data, and both fundraising and primary data collection can take a really long time. If you can find utilities, off-grid companies, cook stove providers, etc. and find ways to add value to them if they work on evaluations with you, you can answer interesting questions faster and often with larger samples than you could by relying on primary data collection alone. Working with local organizations is also a good way to practice balancing practical relevance with academic relevance, which is something that most development economists strive for. 

Can you share a fun or memorable anecdote from your postdoc experience that made your time at J-PAL special?

Spending the year at UCSB offered so many fun outdoor activities! I took up paddle boarding and surfing (even though I’m terrible at it), and I took full advantage of all of the great trail running in the mountains around Santa Barbara.