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

  1. 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] 


  2. 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] 


  3. 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] 


  4. 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.)


  5. 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] 


  6. 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

  1. Take your time or take your chance: Time discounting as a distorted probability (2018).
    (with M. Abdellaoui, E. Kemel, F. Vieider)  

Other writing

  1. Four reasons why analysis of economic policy and religion go hand-in-hand in sub-Saharan Africa. PEGNet Policy Brief, 2021.


  2. Economics Experiments in Africa: How Many and by Whom? CODESRIA Bulletin No. 1, 2020

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