Conference Program: Firms, Trade, and Development 2023

Robin Burgess is a Professor of Economics, Co-Founder and Director of the International Growth Centre and Director of the Economics of Environment and Energy Research Programme, all at the LSE. He also serves as the current President of BREAD, as Co-Director (with Michael Greenstone) of the Coase Project on the Economics of Climate, Energy and Environment, on the Editorial Board of VoxDev, on the Board of CEGA and is an Affiliate of J-PAL and Y-RISE, a Research Fellow in CEPR and a Fellow of the British Academy. His main interests are in the areas of environmental economics, development economics and political economy and he is currently working in Bangladesh, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Myanmar, Pakistan, South Korea and Uganda.

Manaswini Rao is an assistant professor of economics at the Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics at the University of Delaware. She specializes in development economics with her research interests in the economics of legal institutions (political economy) and organization structures in agricultural production. Her research can be classified into three major buckets. First, she studies the role of frontline judiciary (e.g. district or county courts) and broader dispute resolution institutions in the economic development process. Second, she examines collective action and coordination in improving agricultural productivity in the context of smallholder agricultural production. This spans farmer producer organization structures, technology diffusion and access to and management of local irrigation resources. Third, she studies the structural transformation process of moving from agricultural production into urban and/or non-agricultural sectors from the lens of rural land inequality.

Philipp Barteska is an economics Phd candidate at the London School of Economics. His research focuses on questions in development economics at the intersection with political economy and organizational economics. His job market paper links the implementation of an industrial policy in South Korea between 1962 and 2001 to individual bureaucrats. He finds that the policy’s success heavily depends on these bureaucrats. More broadly, Philipp seeks to understand how economic development is affected by the interaction of policies and state capacity.

Tristan Reed is an applied economist at the World Bank's Development Research Group. His research documents how economic and political competition shape economic development. Alongside research, he provides advice to World Bank clients on sector development strategy and trade and competition policy. Prior to joining the Bank, Tristan was a management consultant. A native of California, he holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University and a B.A. summa cum laude from UCLA. He is an advisory board member at Research in Color, a nonprofit dedicated to increasing the number of Ph.D. students of color in social science. He lives in Washington DC, and is also passionate about cooking and gardening.

Garima Sharma is a post-doctoral fellow in the Industrial Relations Section at Princeton University. She received a Ph.D. in Economics from MIT, and in 2024 she will join Northwestern University as an Assistant Professor of Economics. 

Here research focuses on development and labor economics. Specific topics she studies include market power in developing countries, the causes and consequences of gender gaps in the labor market, and the role of social protection in improving the lives of the poor.

Martin Rotemberg is an Assistant Professor of Economics at New York University. His research focuses on industrial policy and growth, and he teaches courses on economic development. 

Dave Donaldson teaches and carries out research on trade, both international and intranational, with applications in the fields of International Economics, Development Economics, Urban Economics, Economic History, Environmental Economics, and Agricultural Economics. He has studied, among other topics: the welfare and inequality effects of market integration, the impact of improvements in transportation infrastructure, how trade can mitigate and exacerbate the effects of climate change, and how economists can quantify market failures and the interventions (such as industrial policy) that attempt to fix them. He was awarded the 2017 John Bates Clark Medal, given by the American Economic Association to the US-based economist “under the age of forty who is judged to have made the most significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge”, as well as an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship and several grants from the National Science Foundation. He has served as a co-editor at Econometrica and American Economic Journal: Applied Economics and is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. A native of Toronto, Canada, Donaldson obtained an undergraduate degree in Physics from Oxford University and a PhD in Economics from the London School of Economics.

Jeremy Majerovitz is an Associate Economist (postdoc) at the the St. Louis Federal Reserve, and a visiting scholar at Washington University in St. Louis. He graduated from MIT in May 2022, with a PhD in Economics.

His research focuses primarily on empirical macroeconomics and development. Much of his research focuses on firm dynamics in a variety of settings.

Dean Karlan serves as the Agency Chief Economist at the U.S. Agency for International Development. Karlan is the Frederic Esser Nemmers Distinguished Professor of Economics and Finance at Northwestern University, co-Director with Christopher Udry of the Global Poverty Research Lab at Northwestern University, and the Founder and former President of Innovations for Poverty Action, a non-profit organization dedicated to discovering and promoting solutions to global poverty problems. Karlan also previously served on the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors of the M.I.T. Jameel Poverty Action Lab. In 2015, he also co-founded ImpactMatters, a nonprofit dedicated to estimating and rating impact of nonprofit organizations in order to help donors choose good charities and to promote more transparency in the nonprofit sector. His research focuses on microeconomic issues of poverty, typically employing experimental methodologies and behavioral economics insights to examine what works, what does not, and why to address social problems. His work spans many geographies and topics, including sustainable income generation for those in abject poverty, credit and savings markets for low income households, agriculture for smallholder farmers, small and medium entrepreneurship and smoking cessation, and charitable giving. He has worked in over twenty countries around the world, including both low-income countries and the United States.

As a social entrepreneur, he co-founded stickK.com, a website that uses lessons from behavioral economics to help people reach personal goals, such as weight loss and smoking cessation, through commitment contracts. In 2011, Karlan co-authored More Than Good Intentions: How a New Economics is Helping to Solve Global Poverty; in 2016 he co-authored Failing in the Field; in 2018 he co-authored The Goldilocks Challenge: Right-Fit Evidence for the Social Sector; and in 2020 he co-authored the third edition of a economics principles textbook, Economics. Karlan received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He was awarded distinguished alumni awards from the University of Chicago Booth Graduate School of Business and the Duke University Talent Identification Program. Previously, Karlan was the Samuel C Park, Jr Professor of Economics at Yale University, and Assistant Professor of Economics at Princeton University. Karlan received a Ph.D. in Economics from M.I.T., an M.B.A. and an M.P.P. from the University of Chicago, and a B.A. in International Affairs from the University of Virginia.

Adnan Khan is the Chief Economist and Director for Economics and Evaluation Directorate in the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO). He is seconded from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), where he is Professor in the School of Public Policy. He has focused his career on advancing the understanding of development economics, political economy, entrepreneurship, and public sector reform. He has taught courses at the London School of Economics on development economics, public organisations, and political economy. He has taught at Harvard Kennedy School and has also been an Academic Director at the School of Public Policy. He has used real-time, cutting-edge analytical work that feeds directly into policy. He has also applied frontier research on real-world questions conducted through collaboration with policy partners to achieve policy and academic impact.

Adnan co-chaired LSE-Oxford Commission on State Fragility, Growth and Development. He continued to work on the theme of fragile states through the follow-up Reducing Fragilities Initiative. He has published in journals on issues such as promoting value-for-money in public procurement, building state capacity by motivating civil servants to perform better, and on promoting entrepreneurship and social protection. He served as Research and Policy Director at the International Growth Centre (IGC) at the LSE. He led research and policy initiatives aimed at promoting economic growth through policymaker-researcher collaboration and by generating ideas based on frontier research on important drivers of economic growth. He has spent more than a decade in policy roles in different capacities and in various government departments. He originally trained as an engineer but moved to public policy and economics, studying at Harvard Kennedy School and Queen’s University.

Liz Lloyd is the Chief Impact Officer at British International Investment.  In this role she leads in overseeing the assessment, measurement and management of development impact activity and engages on focus areas such gender, job quality, climate change and human capital.

Liz was previously at Standard Chartered, where she held senior positions including Group Company Secretary, CEO of Standard Chartered Bank Tanzania and Group Head of Public Affairs.

Before that she was Deputy Chief of Staff for Prime Minister Tony Blair and a senior adviser on Africa, Home Affairs and the Environment at No. 10. She received a CBE in 2008.

Godfrey Kamutando holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Cape Town. His thesis focuses on the sustainability of the manufacturing sector in Zimbabwe. His research interests are in applied economics, labor economics, and econometrics. He has a keen interest in international trade; firms; labor markets and informality; and firm innovation. He has contributed to several research papers and publications, addressing critical economic issues in Africa on these topics. Some of his notable works include studies on firm innovation, allocative efficiency in manufacturing firms, international trade, labor market segmentation, and more. He is driven by a relentless curiosity to explore and understand the economic and social forces that shape our world. He has also enriched his research experience as a Visiting Fellow at international institutions such as the United Nations University's World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) and the German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA). His research and academic journey reflect his commitment to making a meaningful impact in the world of economics and beyond. 

Rikhia Bhukta is a third-year PhD student in the Department of Economic Sciences at Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur. Her research interest lies in development economics, applied econometrics and policy evaluation. More specifically, she is interested in studying the driving factors behind economic and social progress of marginalized communities in India, like women and marginalised castes. She has a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in economics from Jadavpur University, Kolkata.

Miguel Ángel Talamas Marcos is an Economist at the Research Department. Miguel holds a Ph.D. in Managerial Economics and Strategy from the Kellogg School of Business at Northwestern University. His research focuses on firms and labor markets in developing countries. Before his doctoral studies, he worked in consulting for McKinsey & Company and Cornerstone Research.

Isabela Manelici is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the London School of Economics. She was an International Economics Section Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Economics at Princeton University. Prior to this she studied Economics at CEMFI and Civil Engineering at Ecole Polytechlnique and Ecole des Ponts ParisTech and also worked for two years at the World bank Infrastructure Unit.

Her current areas of research include international trade and development economics