EGC’s Rockefeller fellowship helped launch the careers of development economists from lower-income countries

by Adena Spingarn

When Ramesh Subramaniam began working at the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in 1997, he frequently found himself drawing on the set of applied research skills he had honed during a two-year postdoctoral Rockefeller Fellowship at the Yale Economic Growth Center (EGC). Today, having risen to the position of ADB’s Director General of the Southeast Asia Department, he credits the program with providing a strong foundation for the rest of his career. 

“Over the last 28 years, the impact of [my time at] Yale has been very high, particularly the research and the applied work,” said Subramaniam. “For every project that my team brings to me, I always look for evidence. How much public expenditure analysis have we done? What kind of impacts have these investments had on health and education outcomes and labor market outcomes?” 

Subramaniam is one of about three dozen international postdoctoral scholars who visited EGC as part of a program on “Gender, the Family and Technical Change in Low-Income Countries,” established in 1988 and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Conceived primarily by T. Paul Schultz, then director of the EGC and now Malcolm K. Brachman Professor Emeritus in Economics at Yale, the program’s postdoctoral fellowship helped launch the academic and policy careers of development researchers from lower-income countries including Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Sudan. Rockefeller fellows have gone on to careers in academia and at organizations such as the World Bank, where they have made important contributions to our understandings of how public policy and technological development in lower-income countries contribute to gender differences in health, education, and employment, and how these differences affect the welfare of families.  

In addition to funding postdoctoral fellows like Subramaniam, who was originally from India and conducted his fellowship 1995-97, the program included four other components. First, it brought together faculty from EGC and several Yale departments in weekly workshops and an annual international seminar considering questions of gender differences, household economics, and technology in lower-income countries from a multi-disciplinary perspective. Second, in order to encourage cross-disciplinary communication about these topics, each year EGC hosted short visits of one week to one month by six scholars from economics-adjacent fields. Third, the program supported predoctoral fellowships for economics students from predominantly lower-income countries. Finally, it funded visits by Yale faculty to postdoctoral scholars in their home countries to give lectures and workshops as well as help build lasting relationships between EGC and local institutions. 

The Rockefeller program began at a time when the field of economics was becoming more reliant on mathematical modeling that required advanced software. Economics programs in many lower-income countries lacked the resources to acquire the newest technology and train students in the latest quantitative methods. 

“I joined EGC at a time when testing models of household behavior and collective models was new,” said Agnes Quisumbing, who became one of the first fellows in the programs when she arrived from the Philippines in 1988 and is now a Senior Research Fellow in the Poverty, Gender, and Inclusion Unit of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and Visiting Professor at the University of the Philippines. “It was really nice to be there, on the cutting edge when these models were being developed.” 

In the late 1980s, the Rockefeller Foundation noted a lack of rigorous research on gender, technology, and household economics – and identified EGC as an institution with the research agenda and global relationships to address this. At a time when most economists did not see gender as a central concern, both EGC and the Rockefeller Foundation recognized that issues of gender were essential for understanding and making meaningful interventions in economic development. They also believed that it was critical for local scholars to understand gender differences and household behavior in their own countries.  

“The EGC program was a masterful model for sustainable outcomes in the field of gender, household economics, and development,” said Joyce Lewinger Moock, the Rockefeller Foundation grant administrator who collaborated with Schultz on the program. “The program’s design influenced other development programs at the Rockefeller Foundation and possibly those of other development agencies. Most important, the research continues to advance this important area of study and increase international scholarship attuned to local specific economic and cultural perspectives.” 

Although economics postdoctoral fellowships are now common, in the late 1980s postdocs were rare outside of the hard sciences. By providing two years of professional and logistical support for development research, the Rockefeller fellowship became what many fellows describe as the cornerstone of their careers. 

“The fellowship entirely changed the course of my career and my research priorities,” said Harounan Kazianga, Professor of Economics at Oklahoma State University’s Spears School of Business, a 2002-2004 fellow originally from Burkina Faso. “Most of the things I'm doing today [are from] the topics that I started building on at the EGC,” he said. 

For 1991-1993 postdoctoral fellow Jeemol Unni, Professor of Economics at the Amrut Mody School of Management at Ahmedabad University in Gujarat, India, the fellowship provided crucial training in the technological tools necessary for econometrics at a time when India was far behind the United States technologically. “I learned so much, starting with just the internet and software.” 

The fellowship also provided a cultural education for the many fellows coming to the US for the first time. Unni and her husband, a fellow economist who was visiting the United States as a Ford fellow, moved to New Haven with their five-year-old daughter, who attended the local public school. When the family arrived, Unni had never had a credit card, used the internet, or bought a car. Ultimately, she and her family became part of a close community of South Asian postdocs and graduate students, many of whom she is still in touch with today. 

Tekabe Ayalew Belay came to New Haven from Ethiopia to become the program’s final scholar (2005-2007) and now works at the World Bank as a Program Leader in Human Development for Nigeria. “What was attractive about the fellowship was it really was not rigid,” he said. “You were not limited to your [initial] area of research. It gave you a lot of flexibility.” He noted that scholars’ research interests evolved in the program, sometimes due to conversations with faculty and students during the weekly brown bag lunches. 

Postdoctoral economists from around the world were attracted to the Rockefeller fellowship because it offered an opportunity to learn from and collaborate with the many prominent development economists at EGC, including Robert Evenson, Gustav Ranis, T. N. Srinivasan, and Christopher Udry. “It was a great place to start a new project because I was exposed to people at the frontier of development economics research,” said Firman Witoelar, a 2004-2006 fellow from Indonesia who is now Associate Professor of Economics at the Crawford School of Public Policy at Australian National University.  

Many fellows said Schultz, who was a pioneer in the study of household economic and demographic economics as well as program director, was a generous mentor both professionally and personally. “Schultz closely followed what the fellows were doing and gave us prompt and very detailed comments and guidance,” said Aysit Tansel, Professor of Economics at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey and a fellow 1991-93. She recalled the clambakes Schultz and his wife, Judy, hosted in their garden every September, as well as Christmas potlucks at EGC. Unni became ill just after arriving in New Haven, and received an enormous medical bill because her insurance coverage had not yet officially started. Schultz arranged for her hospital visit to be covered. 

During their two years at Yale, Rockefeller fellows engaged frequently with both EGC faculty and graduate students. 

“For many of us, it gave us a chance to acquire a new set of professional peers: peers who would be internationally recognized,” Quisumbing said. “It broadened one’s network if you were coming from a developing country with a more limited network.” 

Many fellows also took advantage of the opportunity to audit classes. “For me, it was a great opportunity to hone my skills and learn from leaders in the field of development,” said Witoelar, who sat in on classes taught by EGC faculty including Rohini Pande, who first taught at Yale in 2003 and is now the Director of EGC and Henry Heinz II Professor of Economics at Yale. 

Today, EGC continues to build on the Rockefeller Fellowship program, which wound down in 2007. Through programs such as the Gender and Growth Gaps project and the Inclusion Economics joint initiative with the MacMillan Center, EGC faculty affiliates and staff are providing frontier research on gender norms and the nature of economic growth. EGC projects and initiatives support postdocs working in this field as well as research by scholars from lower-income countries. For example, the Kuznets short-term visitors program brings nominated scholars to EGC for 1-2 week stays. In addition, the IDE master’s program now offers two scholarships for African students annually.