About

Professor Pascaline Dupas is an invited researcher affiliated with the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). Her work is focused on conducting randomized impact evaluations to answer critical questions in the fight against poverty. She is based at a university where academic freedom to publish results is protected, and she is involved in research initiatives that promote rigorous evaluation of innovative interventions aimed at reducing poverty and improving lives worldwide. Her research contributes to understanding how policies and programs can be designed and implemented effectively to address issues related to poverty, health, education, gender, and governance.

Research topics

• Medicine
• Internal medicine
• Environmental health
• Political Science
• Demography
• Surgery
• Economics
• Emergency medicine
• Immunology
• Development economics
• Psychology
• Pediatrics

Selected publications

• Gender Differences in Economics Seminars

  American Economic Review · 2026-01-30

  article1st authorCorresponding

  We assess whether men and women are treated differently when presenting their economics research. We collected data across thousands of seminars, job market talks, and conference presentations, leveraging human judgment and audio-processing algorithms to measure the number, tone, and type of interruptions. Within a seminar series, women are interrupted more than men. This holds when controlling for characteristics of the presenter, paper, and audience. Interruptions that are negative in tenor or tone or cut off the presenter mid-sentence increase for women presenters. We also find greater engagement of female audience members with female presenters, suggesting a potential role model effect. (JEL A11, C45, J16, J44)

  PublisherDOI

• Public Health Insurance in Low- and Middle-Income Countries

  The MIT Press eBooks · 2026-03-10

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Unmet Need for Effective Health InsuranceThe 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, adopted by all United Nations member states in 2015, considers "good health and well-being for all" as the third of seventeen key goals.Universal health coverage (UHC), where all people can access quality health services without facing financial hardship, is widely considered to be a necessary step toward this goal.Historically, most low-and middle-income countries (LMICs) have sought to ensure health care access through tax-funded systems that directly provide free or heavi ly subsidized health care through public hospitals and primary health centers.However, care quality at such public facilities has been found to be low, and a substantial share of house holds exit to the private sector at substantial personal cost.Besides efforts to improve quality and oversight at public facilities, a growing number of LMIC governments are setting up public health insurance schemes, with the dual objectives of insulating patients from the financial burden of advanced hospital care and improving health outcomes. 13

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A New Perspective on Spatial Heterogeneity in African Development

  AEA Papers and Proceedings · 2026-05-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Access to basic infrastructure is critical for quality of life and economic development. However, data about infrastructure access in low-income countries are sparse and costly to collect. We leverage satellite imagery and survey data to train a machine learning model to predict infrastructure access for each 6.72 kilometer by 6.72 kilometer area of Africa. To show this dataset's value, we use spatial regression discontinuity to study how much infrastructure heterogeneity across countries comes from differences in institutional quality, finding a positive effect of modest magnitude, reconciling previous contradicting results.

  PublisherDOI

• The Changing Landscape of International Development: An Introduction

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Expanding Access to Safe Water in Nigeria

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2025-10-11

  dataset
  PublisherDOI

• Skin Color and Secondary Education in Ghana

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2025-06-19

  dataset1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Good Wife? Reputation Dynamics and Financial Decision-Making inside the Household

  American Economic Review · 2025-01-30 · 3 citations

  article

  We study reputation dynamics within the household in a setting where women regularly receive transfers from their husbands for household purchases. We propose a signaling model in which wives try to maintain a good reputation in the eyes of their husbands to receive high transfers. This leads them to (i) avoid risky purchases (goods with unknown returns) and (ii) knowingly overuse low-return goods to hide bad purchase decisions—we call this the intrahousehold sunk cost effect. We present supportive evidence for the model from a series of experiments with married couples in rural Malawi. (JEL D13, D82, J12, J16, O12, O18)

  PublisherDOI

• Competition and Management Upgrading: Experimental Evidence from Ethiopia

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-06-01

  reportOpen access

  We experimentally test two seminal hypotheses on the impact of competition on firms' management upgrading.In a first experiment, we protect firms from labor market competition by reducing the risk that a freshly trained manager would be poached by a rival firm.We find that this protection does not increase firms' investment in management training.In a second suite of experiments, we boost perceived product market competition by informing firms either that rival firms have received management training or that foreign firms are gaining easier access to the domestic market.Again, we find no evidence that this increases firms' average willingness to invest in management training.To explain why firms do not feel threatened by competition, we present evidence suggesting that, in contrast to commonly held assumptions, firm managers in our setting hold a mental model of competition that posits positive-instead of negative-spillovers, arising primarily from differentiation.

  PublisherDOI

• Valuing the Time of the Self-Employed

  The Review of Economic Studies · 2025-01-07 · 2 citations

  article

  Abstract People’s value of their own time is a key input in public policy evaluations—these evaluations should account for time taken away from work or leisure as a result of policy. Measuring this value for the self-employed is challenging, as, by definition, it is not priced by the market. Using rich choice data collected from farming households in western Kenya, we show that households exhibit non-transitive preferences. As a result, neither market wages nor standard valuation techniques correctly measure participants’ value of time. Using a structural model, we identify the behavioural wedges in participants’ choices and find that distortions appear when households exchange cash either for time or for goods. Our model estimates suggest that valuing the time of the self-employed at 60% of the market wage is a reasonable rule of thumb.

  PublisherDOI

• Informing Mothers about the Benefits of Conversing with Infants: Experimental Evidence from Ghana

  American Economic Journal Economic Policy · 2025-04-29

  article1st authorCorresponding

  We evaluate a low-cost intervention designed to boost parents’ verbal engagement with infants, which tends to be limited in developing countries. In our randomized experiment, recent or expectant mothers watched a three-minute informational video and received a themed calendar. Six months later, treated mothers reported stronger belief in the benefits of verbal engagement, more frequent parent-infant conversation, and more advanced infant language skills. Treatment effects on objective measures of parent-child conversation frequency and infant skills were positive but insignificant. We find larger immediate treatment effects on objective parent-child conversation, suggesting potentially larger long-term effects had the behavior change stuck more. (JEL D83, D91, I26, J13, J16, O12)

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Women Empowerment & Child Health in Developing Countries - Continuation 2

  NIH · $2.9M · 2001–2018

• Identifying Delivery Strategies for Cost-Effective Health Interventions in Kenya

  NIH · $8.2M · 2017

• CAREER: Empirical Studies of Technology Adoption

  NSF · $459k · 2013–2018

Frequent coauthors

• Esther Duflo

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  238 shared

• Jonathan Robinson

  111 shared

• Florencia Devoto

  102 shared

• Michael Kremer

  University of Chicago

  87 shared

• Michael Kremer

  60 shared

• Victor Pouliquen

  60 shared

• William Parienté

  49 shared

• Vincent Pons

  47 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Economics

  Harvard University

  2010

• M.A., Economics

  Harvard University

  2005

• B.A., Economics

  Stanford University

  2000