About

Isabelle Cohen is an Assistant Professor at the Evans School of Public Policy & Governance at the University of Washington, having joined the school in 2021. Her research focuses on institutional capacity constraints in developing countries, including issues related to taxation under low enforcement capacity, digital identification, and gender norms such as child marriage. Her work often employs large-scale randomized control trials, with ongoing projects in countries including Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Uganda. Cohen holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley, an M.P.P. from the College of William & Mary, and a B.A. in International Relations from the same institution. Prior to her doctoral studies, she worked as a Research Manager at the Centre for Microfinance at IFMR Lead in Tamil Nadu, India.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Economics
• Computer Science
• Economic growth
• Internet privacy
• Development economics
• Geography
• Public relations
• Psychology
• Business
• Public economics
• Mathematics education
• Law
• Macroeconomics

Selected publications

• A big-push community intervention reduced rates of child marriage by 80%

  Nature · 2026-03-11 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Marriage of adolescent girls in Nigeria reduced by 80% by ‘big push’ intervention

  Nature · 2026-03-11

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Allocating Identity: Distribution and Impact of Kaduna State's KADRIMA Card

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2025-11-03

  dataset
  PublisherDOI

• Allocating Identity: Distribution and Impact of Kaduna State's KADRIMA Card

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2025-11-03

  dataset
  PublisherDOI

• The Effects of Information on Gridless Households’ Demand for Solar Lanterns in Rural Ghana

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Auditing from Below: Experimental Evidence from Consumer Receipt Lottery

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2025-11-11

  datasetSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Allocating Identity: Distribution and Impact of Kaduna State's KADRIMA Card

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2025-11-03

  dataset
  PublisherDOI

• Auditing from Below: Experimental Evidence from Consumer Receipt Lottery

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2025-11-11

  datasetSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Impact of environmental, health, and safety sensitization on Liquefied Petroleum Gas usage in Ghana

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2024-03-27

  dataset1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Documenting Decentralization: Empirical Evidence on Administrative Unit Proliferation from Uganda

  The World Bank Economic Review · 2024-03-09 · 7 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Decentralization is an important and commonplace type of reform, yet our understanding of its effects remains limited. This paper documents the effects of the 2009–10 wave of district creation in Uganda, which increased the country’s districts by 42 percent, using rich data on subdistrict units to assess the effects of district creation on a broad range of post-decentralization outcomes in a difference-in-differences framework. The effects of decentralization are concentrated in newly split off—rather than split from—districts, and are heterogeneous across outcome types. Newly split-off districts have more per capita frontline workers, but appear to have worse quality infrastructure and lower economic development. The study also presents suggestive evidence that administrative capacity decreases for newly formed districts post-split. These findings demonstrate the importance of considering a broad range of outcomes when thinking about decentralization.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Eduardo Nakasone

  6 shared

• Máximo Torero

  5 shared

• Erica Field

  Duke University

  5 shared

• Alberto Chong

  University of the Pacific

  5 shared

• Hamdiyah Alhassan

  University for Development Studies

  4 shared

• Isaac Doku

  4 shared

• Emma Riley

  3 shared

• Nadia Dalma

  Prolepsis Institute

  2 shared

Education

• PhD, Department of Economics

  University of California Berkeley

  2021