I am an assistant professor of economics at the University of Louvain and I study how risk and uncertainty shape economic decision making. I have a particular interest in understanding how contemporary religious institutions evolve to provide substitutes to insurance and other services that might otherwise be provided by formal markets. I have experience running a variety of lab, field, and lab-type field experiments in what some coauthors insist on calling “exotic places”.
Please click here for my CV.
Journal Publications
- When When Money Can’t Buy Political Love: Lab Experiments on Vote Buying in Ghana and Uganda (2024). accepted at Economic Development and Cultural Change
(with D. Burbidge and N. Cheeseman)
[code and data]
- Time for Tea Now. Discounting for Money and Consumption without the
Utility Confound (2024). The Journal of Development Economics
(with M. Abdellaoui, E. Kemel, F.Vieider)
[pdf] [code and data]
- The Globalizability of Temporal Discounting (2022). Nature Human Behavior
(second author in large collaboration with K. Ruggeri,…, and E. Garcia-Garzon)
[pdf] [research briefing] [code and data]
- Field Experiments in the Global South: Assessing Risks, Localizing
Benefits, and Addressing Positionality (2021). PS: Political Science
and Politics
(with E. Hermanⓡ, E. Wellman, G. Blair, L. Pruett, K. Opalo, H. Alarian, A. Grossman, Y. Tan, A. Dyzenhaus, and N. Owsley.)
- God insures those who pay: formal insurance and religious offering
in Ghana (2020). Quarterly Journal of Economics
(with E. Auriol, J. Lassebie, E. Raiber, P. Seabright)
[pdf] [code and data]
- Measuring Time and Risk Preferences in an Integrated
Framework (2019). Games and Economic Behaviour
(with M. Abdellaoui, E. Kemel, F. Vieider)
[pdf] [code and data]
Working papers
- Take your time or take your chance: Time discounting as a distorted
probability (2018).
(with M. Abdellaoui, E. Kemel, F. Vieider)
Other writing
- Four reasons why analysis of economic policy and religion go
hand-in-hand in sub-Saharan Africa. PEGNet Policy Brief, 2021.
[link]
- Economics Experiments in Africa: How Many and by Whom?
CODESRIA Bulletin No. 1, 2020
[link]
Work in progress
- Cognitive consequences of insecure national belonging
(with Ritwik Banerjee, Joseph Gomes, and Emmy Lindstam)
- Platform competition between religious organisations.
(with Emmanuelle Auriol, Eva Raiber and Paul Seabright)
- Using religion to ensure mental health in Ghana