Meet our newest J-PAL affiliates
Seven researchers recently joined J-PAL's academic network: Sule Alan at the University of Essex, Sarah Cohodes at Columbia University, Marcel Fafchamps at Stanford University, Billy Jack at Georgetown University, Kirabo Jackson at Northwestern Univesity, Christopher Knittel at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Christopher Woodruff at Oxford University.
Their varied research interests span numerous topics, including enterprise growth in low-income countries, household financial decision-making, parents' and students' education choices, teacher labor markets, entrepreneurship, digital financial inclusion, and energy efficiency investments. Learn more about their work below:
Sule Alan
Sule Alan is a professor of economics at the University of Essex UK, and an adjunct professor at Bilkent University, Turkey. Her research primarily focuses on topics around household finance and household behavior. She has been conducting large-scale educational interventions across Turkey in collaboration with the Turkish Ministry of Education, Bilkent University, ING Bank and Regional Environment Center.
Sarah Cohodes
Sarah Cohodes is an assistant professor of education policy and economics at Teachers College at Columbia University. Her research uses quantitative causal inference methods to evaluate programs and policies that have the potential to ameliorate achievement gaps. She is particularly interested in how young people and their families make choices about education and how school and college quality interact with those decisions.
Marcel Fafchamps
Marcel Fafchamps is a Senior Fellow at the Freeman-Spogli Institute of International Studies at Stanford University. His research interests include economic development, market institutions, and social networks. His research focuses on entrepreneurship, factor markets, and the efficiency of social networks in Africa and South Asia. He has ongoing research on political economy issues in Africa and Asia.
Billy Jack
Billy Jack is vice provost of research and a professor of economics at Georgetown University. His research is within the fields of applied economic theory, health economics, public economics, and development economics. Among his areas of interest are issues related to political economy, governance, global health, and development.
Kirabo Jackson
Kirabo Jackson is professor of human development and social policy at Northwestern University. He is a labor economist who studies education and social policy issues. The majority of Kirabo’s work has focused on better understanding teacher labor markets. His research on teachers analyzes the role of peer learning in teacher effectiveness and how best to measure teacher quality among other related topics.
Christopher Knittel
Christopher Knittel is the George P. Shultz Professor of Applied Economics in the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the director of MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research and co-directs the E2e project. His research focuses on industrial organization, environmental economics, and applied econometrics.
Christopher Woodruff
Christopher Woodruff is a professor of development economics and a fellow at the University of Oxford. Christopher’s research focuses on enterprises in low-income countries. His recent work includes measurement of rates of return to capital investments in microenterprises and the effect of formal registration on enterprise performance.
