Abhijit Banerjee is the Ford Foundation International Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is a graduate of the University of Calcutta and Jawaharlal Nehru University and received his Ph.D in 1988 from Harvard University. Abhijit is co-founder of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (along with Esther Duflo and Sendhil Mullainathan) and remains one of the directors of the lab. He is a past president of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development and a former Guggenheim Fellow and Alfred P. Sloan Fellow. Abhijit serves as a research fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Center for Economic Policy Research, the Kiel Institute, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society. His fields of interest include Economic Development, Information Theory, Theory of Income Distribution and Macroeconomics. He has authored two books and numerous published journal articles and finished his first documentary film, "The name of the disease" in 2006.

Chris Blattman is an Assistant Professor of Political Science.  He holds a PhD in Economics from the University of California at Berkeley, and a Master's in Public Administration and International Development (MPA/ID) from the Harvard Kennedy School.  Chris' research examines the causes and consequences of civil war, the reintegration of ex-combatants, post-conflict economic and social programs, and the development of new forms of governance and peace building after war. Much of his work applies field experiments (and natural experiments) to conflict and post-conflict scenarios.  From 2005 to 2007 Chris co-directed the Survey of War Affected Youth http://www.sway-uganda.org in northern Uganda.  He is currently evaluating peacebuilding and governance programs in Liberia and Uganda. Previous regions of field work include Kenya and India.  Chris teaches courses on the political economy of civil war and terror, African development, and applied econometrics.

Pascaline Dupas is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is a graduate of Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris I-Sorbonne and received her Ph.D in 2006 from EHESS-PSE and DELTA (Paris). Formerly an Assistant Professor at Dartmouth College and a Visiting Fellow at New York University, Pascaline received the Rainer Arnhold Fellowship of the Mulago Foundation for 2005-2007 and founded TAMTAM Africa, a non-profit organization which provides insecticide treated nets to pregnant women through rural prenatal clinics. Pascaline currently serves as a research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development, and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab. Pascaline's fields of interest include Development Economics, Health, Education and Savings, with a focus on the importance of pricing, peer effects and information on health and education in developing countries, primarily Kenya.

Xavier Giné is a Senior Economist in the Finance and Private Sector Development Team of the Development Research Group at the World Bank. Since joining the World Bank as a Young Economist in 2002, his research has focused on access to financial services and rural financial markets. In recent papers, he investigated the macroeconomic effects of a credit liberalization; the relationship between formal and informal sources of credit in rural credit markets; indigenous interlinked credit contracts in the fishing industry and the impact of weather insurance. Prior to joining the Bank he was a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer at the Economic Growth Center at Yale University. He holds an MA and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago.

Justine Hastings is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Yale University. She is a graduate of the University of California at Davis and received her Ph.D in 2001 from the University of California at Berkeley. She is a Resident Fellow at Yale University's Institution for Social and Policy Studies and a Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Justine's research focuses on decision making behavior in low-income and minority communities, and the impact of these behaviors on educational attainment, savings, and consumption. Other research investigates how government interventions and regulated markets can be designed to maximize opportunities for the disadvantaged.

Dean Karlan is Professor of Economics at Yale University and President and Founder of IPA. He is a graduate of the University of Chicago's Harris Graduate School of Public Policy and Graduate School of Business and received his Ph.D in 2002 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), and the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, Dean is also a research fellow at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab and the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development. His research focuses on microeconomic issues of public policies and poverty. Much of his work uses behavioral economics insights and approaches to examine economic and policy issues relevant to developing countries as well as to domestic charitable fundraising and political participation.

Leigh Linden is an Assistant Professor in both the Department of Economics and the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. His research focuses on the ability of social services to improve the well being of children, especially in impoverished areas.Leigh Linden is an Assistant Professor in both the Department of Economics and the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. He was a Visiting Research Scholar at the Center for Research for Child Wellbeing and the Center for Health and Wellbeing, both at Princeton University. He is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin and received his Ph.D. in 2004 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research explores the microeconomic determinants of income inequality and poverty, focusing on the ability of social services, and in particular education, to improve the well being of children from poor families.

David McKenzie is a Senior Economist at the Development Research Group, The World Bank, where he was a core team member on the 2007 World Development Report. He is a graduate of the University of Auckland and received his Ph.D in 2001 from Yale University. Formerly an Assistant Professor of Economics at Stanford University, David is a research fellow at the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration, the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development, and the Institute for the Study of Labor, an Associate Editor of the Journal of Development Economics, as well as serving on the Editorial Board of the World Bank Economic Review. His work focuses on the barriers to microenterprise growth, and on the impact of migration on developing countries. He has conducted the first randomized evaluation of migration (of Tongans moving to New Zealand) and experiments on the return to capital in microenterprises in Sri Lanka and Mexico.

Sendhil Mullainathan is Professor of Economics at Harvard University. He is a graduate of Cornell University and received his Ph.D from Harvard University in 1998. Sendhil is a co-founder of Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (along with Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo) and remains a research fellow of the lab. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau for Economic Research, a member of the Russell Sage Foundation Behavioral Economics Roundtable and a board member at the Bureau of Research in Economic Analysis of Development. Sendhil was awarded the MacArthur Fellow, 2003-2008 and the Sloan Foundation Fellow, 2001-2003 among others. His areas of research include Development Economics, Behavioral Economics, Corporate Finance, and Applied Microeconomics with particular interests in setting of wages, executive compensation, racial discrimination in the labor market, public policy and social structure in developing nations, and behavioral economics of the poor.

Jonathan Robinson is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received his Ph.D in 2007 from Princeton University. Jonathan is also a member of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT and an Affiliate at the Center of Evaluation for Global Action at the University of California, Berkeley. Jonathan's research focuses on economic development, with an emphasis on field experiments and data collection, and much of his work in these areas has been done in Kenya.

Dean Yang is an Associate Professor at the Ford School of Public Policy and Department of Economics, University of Michigan. His areas of research interest include microfinance, international migration and remittances, human capital, disasters, international trade, and crime and corruption. He is currently running survey work and field experiments among El Salvador migrant workers in the U.S., among Philippine migrant workers in Qatar, and on microfinance in Malawi. Professor Yang teaches courses in development economics and microeconomics at the undergraduate, master's, and Ph.D. levels. During 2006-07, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University. He has worked as a consultant on development issues for the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the UNDP, and in El Salvador and Peru. A native of the Philippines, he received his undergraduate and Ph.D. degrees in economics from Harvard University.