Lecturer in the Political Economy of Development Programme Director, Development Management
Department
Development Studies Institute (DESTIN) Suntory & Toyota International Centres for Economics & Related Disciplines (STICERD) Institute for Latin American Studies (ILAS)
Biography
My work lies at the frontier between economics and politics, blending quantitative and qualitative forms of evidence in an attempt to discover why some groups of people govern themselves well and others don't. Specific fields include political economy, public economics, comparative politics and development economics.
I've worked extensively on Latin America, especially Bolivia, Colombia, Argentina and Chile, in both the academic and policy worlds. I'm interested in social organizations and social dynamics, and their effects on policy-making and economic performance. I am also interested in competing theoretical approaches to politics as collective decision-making vs. organized forms of violence. And I am interested in the violence that remains when politics subsides.
Since 2001 I have been involved with Joe Stiglitz' Initiative for Policy Dialogue, Decentralization Task Force. Before coming to DESTIN I was Director of Studies of the MSc programme in Global Market Economics and Public Financial Policy (economics department). Before coming to the LSE I was the World Bank's "Social Investment Expert" in La Paz, supervising Bolivia's Social Investment Fund as well as projects in health, education, early childhood development and the environment. I studied at Princeton (AB Politics & Latin American Studies), Harvard (MPP), and the LSE (MSc Economics & PhD Political Economy), where I was awarded the William Robson Memorial Dissertation Prize..
Research interests and area of supervision
Political economy
Comparative politics
Development economics
Public economics
Decentralization
Local government effectiveness
The political, economic and social determinants of civil violence
Economics and politics of Latin America, especially Bolivia, Colombia Argentina and Chile
Decentralization and Local Government in Bolivia: An Overview from the Bottom Up Forthcoming in P Bardhan and D Mookherjee (eds). The Rise Of Local Governments In Developing Countries: An International Perspective on Recent Decentralization Reforms, a book sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation network on Inequality and Economic Performance.
Title