Ferran Vega-Carol is a PhD candidate in public policy and economics at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy. At Duke, he is also a member of the Development Lab in the Department of Economics and of the Energy Access Project.

He is a development economist working at the intersection of gender, energy, and behavioral economics. His dissertation research examines women's empowerment in Myanmar and Peru through the lenses of agency, aspirations, and the reduction of intimate partner violence using RCTs and lab-in-the-field experiments.

His other ongoing work employs RCTs, quasi-experimental methods, and survey experiments to study the adoption and impact of climate resilience technologies and willingness to pay for resilience in Kenya; the potential of a customer engagement and simulation platform to improve mini-grid financial sustainability in East Africa; and the scope to leverage fodder cultivation for grassland conservation in Mongolia.  

Prior to Duke, he obtained an M.Sc. in Development Economics from the University of Oxford and a B.A in economics from University College Utrecht, and conducted field research in Ghana, Tanzania, and Sierra Leone.