Professor Faguet works at the frontier between economics and politics, using quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate the institutions and organizational forms that underpin rapid development. Specific fields include political economy, comparative politics, institutional economics, and development economics.
Professor Faguet’s current work examines historical institutions, inequality and long-term, divergent development outcomes in Colombia. He is also interested in decentralization, federalism and local governance, the interactions between civil society and public sector effectiveness, and spatial patterns of politics and violence at the subnational level, especially in Latin America and South Asia. Longer-term interests include the application of institutional theory to development statics and dynamics, the death of foreign aid and the rise of "development clubs", the theory of 'social enterprise', and how to blend qualitative and quantitative methodologies for social science research.
Professor Faguet is the current Chair of the Decentralization Task Force, part of Joseph Stiglitz's Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia University. Before coming to the LSE he worked for the World Bank in La Paz, Bolivia on health, education, early childhood development and the environment. He trained in both political science and economics at Princeton, Harvard and the LSE, where his dissertation won the William Robson Memorial Prize. His book Decentralization and Popular Democracy was awarded the W.J.M. Mackenzie Prize for best political science book of 2012.