Dean Karlan
· Professor of Economics and Finance, Frederic Esser Nemmers Chair; Co-Director, Global Poverty Research LabNorthwestern University · Management & Organizations
Active 2001–2026
Academic metrics are sourced from OpenAlex and public funding records; values may differ from Google Scholar.
About
Dean Karlan is the Frederic Esser Nemmers Distinguished Professor of Economics and Finance at Northwestern University. He is the Founder and former President of Innovations for Poverty Action, a non-profit organization dedicated to discovering and promoting solutions to global poverty problems. Karlan has also served as the Chief Economist at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) from 2022 until 2025. Prior to his role at USAID, he was on the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors of the M.I.T. Jameel Poverty Action Lab. His research focuses on microeconomic issues of poverty, employing experimental methodologies and behavioral economics insights to examine what works, what does not, and why in addressing social problems. His work spans many geographies and topics, including sustainable income generation for those in abject poverty, credit and savings markets for low-income households, agriculture for smallholder farmers, small and medium entrepreneurship, weight loss and smoking cessation, and charitable giving. Karlan has worked in over twenty countries, including low-income nations and the United States. As a social entrepreneur, he co-founded stickK.com, a website that uses behavioral economics to help people reach personal goals through commitment contracts. He has co-authored several books, including 'More Than Good Intentions: How a New Economics is Helping to Solve Global Poverty,' 'Failing in the Field,' and 'The Goldilocks Challenge:…
Research topics
- Medicine
- Computer Science
- Psychology
- Nursing
- Virology
- Social psychology
- Environmental health
- Economics
- Business
- Artificial Intelligence
Selected publications
COVID-19 vaccine acceptance and hesitancy in low- and middle-income countries
Nature Medicine · 2021 · 1126 citations
Widespread acceptance of COVID-19 vaccines is crucial for achieving sufficient immunization coverage to end the global pandemic, yet few studies have investigated COVID-19 vaccination attitudes in lower-income countries, where large-scale vaccination is just beginning. We analyze COVID-19 vaccine acceptance across 15 survey samples covering 10 low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in Asia, Africa and South America, Russia (an upper-middle-income country) and the United States, including a tot…
Science Advances · 2021 · 472 citations
Despite numerous journalistic accounts, systematic quantitative evidence on economic conditions during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic remains scarce for most low- and middle-income countries, partly due to limitations of official economic statistics in environments with large informal sectors and subsistence agriculture. We assemble evidence from over 30,000 respondents in 16 original household surveys from nine countries in Africa (Burkina Faso, Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda, Sierra Leone), Asia (Banglad…
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2021 · 348 citations
= 47,306) testing 19 nudges delivered to patients via text message and designed to boost adoption of the influenza vaccine. Our findings suggest that text messages sent prior to a primary care visit can boost vaccination rates by an average of 5%. Overall, interventions performed better when they were 1) framed as reminders to get flu shots that were already reserved for the patient and 2) congruent with the sort of communications patients expected to receive from their healthcare provider (i.e.…
Megastudies improve the impact of applied behavioural science
Nature · 2021 · 254 citations
A 680,000-person megastudy of nudges to encourage vaccination in pharmacies
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2022 · 191 citations
Encouraging vaccination is a pressing policy problem. To assess whether text-based reminders can encourage pharmacy vaccination and what kinds of messages work best, we conducted a megastudy. We randomly assigned 689,693 Walmart pharmacy patients to receive one of 22 different text reminders using a variety of different behavioral science principles to nudge flu vaccination or to a business-as-usual control condition that received no messages. We found that the reminder texts that we tested incr…
Recent grants
NSF · $200k · 2020–2022
CAREER: Field Experiments in Credit, Insurance, and Behavioral Economics
NSF · $400k · 2006–2012
Testing Microfinance Theories: Field Experiments in Developing Countries
NSF · $257k · 2006–2009
Frequent coauthors
- 1005 shared
Jonathan Zinman
- 289 shared
Christopher Udry
- 184 shared
Julian Jamison
University of Exeter
- 148 shared
Bram Thuysbaert
- 143 shared
Sneha Stephen
- 96 shared
Gharad Bryan
- 96 shared
Robert Osei
University of Ghana
- 95 shared
Adam Osman
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Labs
Global Poverty Research LabPI
Education
- 1999
Ph.D., Economics
University of California, Berkeley
- 1995
M.A., Economics
University of California, Berkeley
- 1991
B.A., Economics
Harvard University
Awards & honors
- Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers…
- Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship
- Guggenheim Fellowship
- University of Chicago Booth School of Business Public Servic…
- Fellow of the Econometric Society
Similar researchers at Northwestern University
- Resume-aware match score
- Save to shortlist
- AI-drafted outreach
See your match with Dean Karlan
PhdFit ranks faculty by your research interests, methods, and publications — grounded in their actual work, not templates.
- Free to start
- No credit card
- 30-second signup