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: Right-Fit Evidence for the Social Sector.' Karlan has received numerous awards, such as the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He previously held academic positions at Yale University and Princeton University, and he earned a Ph.D. in Economics from MIT, an MBA and an M.P.P. from the University of Chicago, and a B.A. in International Affairs from the University of Virginia.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Medicine
• Psychology
• Virology
• Nursing
• Social psychology
• Environmental health
• Economics
• Family medicine
• Artificial Intelligence
• Business
• Internet privacy
• Computer Security
• Political Science
• Sociology
• Economic growth
• Social Science
• Immunology
• Advertising
• Law
• Socioeconomics
• Demographic economics
• Medical emergency
• Mathematics

Selected publications

• Great Expectations: Responses to Current and Future Transfers for Low-Income Individuals

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Group versus Individual Coaching for Rural Social Protection Programs: Evidence from Uganda, Philippines, and Bangladesh

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-10-01

  reportOpen access

  Multifaceted social protection programs in low-income countries often include both capital grants and informational and behavioral support on the premise that households face simultaneous and multiple frictions.To tackle informational and behavioral constraints, programs typically deploy either individual or group coaching visits from field agents.The relative efficacy of individual versus group coaching could provide insights into the underlying mechanism through which information and behavioral support change household decisions.However, in three similar randomized evaluations in Uganda, the Philippines, and Bangladesh, we find no differences in efficacy.Given its 15-20% lower costs, group coaching is more cost-effective.

  PublisherDOI

• Does Q&A Boost Engagement? Health Messaging Experiments in the U.S. and Ghana

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  reportOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Promoting entrepreneurship among migrants and host populations in Colombia

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2025-01-17

  datasetSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Human Capital at Home: Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation in the Philippines

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Does Q&A Boost Engagement? Health Messaging Experiments in the United States and Ghana

  Management Science · 2025-08-28

  articleOpen access

  Effective information sharing is critical for the success of organizations and governments. Because information that is easy to access is more likely to be adopted, leaders often minimize friction in information delivery. However, one type of friction may increase engagement: piquing curiosity by posing relevant questions prior to sharing information. To test this, we shared identical information about COVID-19 in either question-and-answer format or via direct statements across two preregistered field experiments in Ghana and Michigan (total n = 49,395). Q&A-style communication increased information seeking about directly related topics (e.g., how to wear a mask properly) by 1.0 percentage point (216%) in Ghana and by 1.1 percentage points (19%) in Michigan (p’s < 0.001) and increased self-reported behavior change by 1.3 percentage points (4%) in Michigan (p = 0.002). However, sharing information in Q&A format did not increase interest in general COVID-19 information in either setting, suggesting that the impact of Q&A-style messaging on information seeking may be issue specific. In Michigan, both Q&A-style and direct statement messaging produced less information seeking than sending no informational messages, likely because of differential attrition: the more texts participants received, the more likely they were to opt out of receiving messages, which made it impossible for them to seek more information via text. In a follow-up implementation experiment with social media ads (a messaging strategy without attrition challenges), Q&A-style ads generated 9%–11% more unique clicks to the CDC website per dollar spent than ads that directly stated information about vaccines (p < 0.001). We speculate that Q&A-style information delivery may stimulate curiosity, driving its benefits. This paper was accepted by Marie Claire Villeval, behavioral economics and decision analysis. Funding: The authors thank the National Science Foundation [RAPID Grant 2033321], the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Northwestern University’s Global Poverty Research Lab, Stanford University’s Golub Capital Social Impact Lab, Harvard Business School, the University of Pennsylvania, the AKO Foundation, John Alexander, Mark J. Leder, and Warren G. Lichtenstein for funding support. This work was also supported by Grand Challenges in Global Health. Supplemental Material: The supplementary materials and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2024.04405 .

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Human Capital at Home: Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation in the Philippines

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Access to Digital Credit for Smallholder Farmers: Experimental Evidence from Ghana

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Does Q&A Boost Engagement? Health Messaging Experiments in the U.S. and Ghana

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Can Soap Operas increase hope? Adding edutainment to a graduation-style program in the Philippines

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2025-11-04

  dataset1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• RAPID: Combating the Spread of COVID-19: Testing Cost-Effective Strategies for Promoting Behavior Change

  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

• Jonathan Zinman

  1005 shared

• Christopher Udry

  289 shared

• Julian Jamison

  University of Exeter

  184 shared

• Bram Thuysbaert

  148 shared

• Sneha Stephen

  143 shared

• Gharad Bryan

  96 shared

• Robert Osei

  University of Ghana

  96 shared

• Adam Osman

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  95 shared

Labs

• Global Poverty Research LabPI

Education

• Ph.D., Economics

  University of California, Berkeley

  1999

• M.A., Economics

  University of California, Berkeley

  1995

• B.A., Economics

  Harvard University

  1991

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