Welcoming J-PAL’s newest affiliates
Four new affiliates recently joined J-PAL’s academic network: Marcella Alsan at the Stanford School of Medicine, Kevin Donovan at the Yale School of Management, Robert Darko Osei at the University of Ghana, and Diego Ubfal at Bocconi University.
Their varied research interests span numerous topics, including health and socioeconomic disparities, firm growth and risk management, land registration, entrepreneurship, the transition from school to work, and attitudes toward immigrants. Learn more about their work below:
Marcella Alsan is an assistant professor of medicine at the Stanford School of Medicine and a core faculty member at the Stanford Center for Health Policy/Primary Care and Outcomes Research. Marcella’s research focuses on the relationship between health and socioeconomic disparities with an emphasis on infectious disease. She uses randomized evaluations and historical public health natural experiments to explore the interactions between infectious disease, human capital, and economic outcomes. Another vein of research focuses on the microfoundations of antibiotic overuse and resistance. Marcella earned a master’s in international public health from the Harvard School of Public Health, an MD from Loyola University, and a PhD in economics from Harvard University.
Kevin Donovan is an assistant professor of economics at the Yale School of Management and an affiliate of the Yale Research Initiative on Innovation and Scale (Y-RISE). His research focuses on both the macro- and microeconomics of economic growth, with emphasis on constraints to firm growth in low- and middle-income countries. His recent work considers risk management among smallholder farmers and the importance of inter-firm knowledge transfers for microenterprise owners, among other topics. Prior to joining Yale, Kevin was an assistant professor of economics at the University of Notre Dame. He earned his Ph.D. in Economics from Arizona State University.
Diego Ubfal is an assistant professor at Bocconi University in Milan. His research is centered in development economics and applied microeconomics. A first line of his research focuses on the transition from school to work. A second line studies entrepreneurship programs, aspirations and networks of entrepreneurs. A third line includes financial access and attitudes towards immigrants. He is currently conducting field experiments in Latin America, Asia and Africa. Diego’s teaching focuses on program evaluation and development economics. Prior to academia, Diego served as a Fulbright scholar and worked on impact evaluation at the Inter-American Development Bank. He earned his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Robert Darko Osei is an Associate Professor in the Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research (ISSER), University of Ghana, Legon, and also the Vice Dean for the School of Graduate Studies at the University of Ghana. His main areas of research include evaluative poverty and rural research, macro and micro implications of fiscal policies, aid effectiveness and other economic development policy concerns. Robert received his Ph.D. from the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom, examining aid, trade and growth in rural Ghana.
