I am an assistant professor of economics at the University of Louvain and I study how risk and uncertainty shape economic decision making. I am particularly interested in how contemporary religious institutions 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.
Publications
- When Money Can’t Buy Political Love: Lab Experiments on Vote Buying in Ghana and Uganda. Economic Development and Cultural Change (2025)
(with D. Burbidge and N. Cheeseman)
[code and data]
- Time for Tea. Measuring Discounting for Money and Consumption Without the Utility Confound. The Journal of Development Economics (2024)
(with M. Abdellaoui, E. Kemel, F. Vieider)
[code and data]
- The Globalizability of Temporal Discounting. Nature Human Behavior (2022)
(second author in large collaboration with K. Ruggeri,…, and E. Garcia-Garzon)
[code and data]
- Field Experiments in the Global South: Assessing Risks, Localizing
Benefits, and Addressing Positionality. PS: Political Science
and Politics (2021)
(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. Quarterly Journal of Economics (2020)
(with E. Auriol, J. Lassebie, E. Raiber and P. Seabright)
[code and data]
- Measuring Time and Risk Preferences in an Integrated
Framework. Games and Economic Behaviour (2019)
(with M. Abdellaoui, E. Kemel, F. Vieider)
[code and data]
Working papers
- Religion and Economic Development: Past, Present and Future (2025)
(with S. Becker, S. Pfaff and J. Rubin)
Other writing
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Four reasons why analysis of economic policy and religion go hand-in-hand in sub-Saharan Africa. PEGNet Policy Brief (2021)
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Economics Experiments in Africa: How Many and by Whom? CODESRIA Bulletin No. 1 (2020)
Work in progress
- Cognitive consequences of insecure national belonging
(with R. Banerjee, J. Gomes, and E. Lindstam)
- Faith-Based Platforms
(with E. Auriol, E. Raiber and P. Seabright)
- Using religion to ensure mental health in Ghana