21st Midwest International Economic Development Conference

Stefan Dercon is a Professor of Economic Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government and the Economics Department, and a Fellow of Jesus College. He is also Director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies, focusing on how to achieve change.

He combines his academic career with work as a policy advisor, providing strategic economic and development advice, and promoting the use of evidence in decision making. Between 2011 and 2017, he was Chief Economist of the Department of International Development (DFID), the government department in charge with the UK’s aid policy and spending. Between 2020-2022, he was the Development Policy Advisor to successive Foreign Secretaries at the UK’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.

He is a Fellow of BREAD, a Research Fellow of CEPR and of IZA, an Affiliate of J-PAL, a Non-resident Fellow, Centre for Global Development, Washington and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and Manufacture (FRSA). He studied economics and philosophy at the Catholic University of Leuven (Belgium) and holds an MPhil and DPhil in Economics from the University of Oxford. Before re-joining the University of Oxford, he held positions at the University of Addis Ababa (Ethiopia), the Catholic University of Leuven, and WIDER (Helsinki), part of the United Nations University.

In 2018, the Queen awarded him as an honorary Companion of the Most Distinguished Order of St Michael and St George (CMG) for services to economics and international development.

Rachel Glennerster is an associate professor of economics in the Division of Social Science at the University of Chicago. She uses randomized trials to study democracy and accountability, health, education, microfinance, and women’s empowerment mainly in West Africa and South Asia. She has also written on strategies to stimulate innovation, promoting more equitable access to vaccines, and the response to Ebola and COVID-19 pandemics.

Dr. Glennerster joined the University of Chicago community after serving as Chief Economist at the Foreign Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) and the Department for International Development in the UK. From 2004 to 2017, she served as Executive Director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) a center in the Economics Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology which seeks to reduce poverty by ensuring policy is informed by scientific evidence and helped pioneer the use of randomized trials in development economics. She also previously served as the Co-Chair of J-PAL’s Agricultural Technology and Adoption Initiative and its Post-Primary Education Initiative.

In 2021, Dr. Glennerster was appointed Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George (CMG) for services in international development. She currently serves as the chair of Teaching at the Right Level (TaRL), a development organization that utilizes evidence-backed educational approaches to help children develop basic reading and mathematical skills.

James J. Heckman is the Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor of Economics and Public Policy and Director of the Center for the Economics of Human Development at the University of Chicago. He has devoted his professional life to understanding the origins of major social and economic questions related to inequality, social mobility, discrimination, and the formation of skills and regulation in labor markets, as well as to devising and applying economically interpretable empirical strategies for understanding and addressing these questions.

His work spans contexts and cultures. Current research at CEHD includes analyzing the impact of early childhood programs around the world by studying the immediate and long-term impacts of interventions (including the impacts in midlife on health and on other family members), both in the United States and in a new project in China. His research also uses original data gathered in the U.S., China and Germany to measure preferences and traits to help inform governments, schools and teachers about how socioemotional can help students achieve their full potential.

In 2000, Heckman won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on the microeconometrics of diversity and heterogeneity and for establishing a sound causal basis for public policy evaluation. He has received numerous other awards for his work, including the John Bates Clark Medal, the Jacob Mincer Award, the 2005 and 2007 Dennis Aigner Award for Applied Econometrics, the Ulysses Medal from the University College Dublin, the Theodore W. Schultz Award, the Gold Medal of the President of the Italian Republic, the Frisch Medal, the Dan David Prize, and the Chinese Government Friendship Award.

Heckman has a B.A. in Mathematics from Colorado College and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton University. He has been at the University of Chicago since 1973. 

Chang-Tai Hsieh conducts research on growth and development. His published papers include “The Life-Cycle of Plants in India and Mexico,” in the Quarterly Journal of Economics; “Misallocation and Manufacturing TFP in China and India,” in the Quarterly Journal of Economics; “Relative Prices and Relative Prosperity,” in the American Economic Review; “Can Free Entry be Inefficient? Fixed Commissions and Social Waste in the Real Estate Industry,” in the Journal of Political Economy; “What Explains the Industrial Revolution in East Asia? Evidence from the Factor Markets,” in the American Economic Review; “The Allocation of Talent and US Economic Growth,” in Econometrica; “How Destructive is Innovation?” in Econometrica; and “Special Deals with Chinese Characteristics,” in the NBER Macroeconomics Annual.

Hsieh has been a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Banks of San Francisco, New York, and Minneapolis, as well as the World Bank’s Development Economics Group and the Economic Planning Agency in Japan. He is a Research Associate for the National Bureau of Economic Research, a Senior Fellow at the Bureau for Research in Economic Analysis of Development, and a member of the Steering Group of the International Growth Center in London.

He is the recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship, an Elected Member of Academia Sinica, and a two-time recipient of the Sun Ye-Fang Prize. 

Daniel Knowles is the Midwest correspondent for The Economist, based in Chicago. He covers stories across the region, but is especially interested in urban government, crime, social change, and transportation.

Mr. Knowles previously worked on the foreign desk in London, as international correspondent, where he covered stories particularly around conflict, corruption and state failure. He has also headed the paper’s bureaus in Mumbai and Nairobi and worked as a political reporter in the Washington, D.C. bureau. Mr. Knowles’s book, “Carmageddon”, about why the world needs fewer automobiles, published in March 2023.

Nancy Qian is an empirical economist and researches questions about economic development, political economy and economic history. She is particularly interested in long-run economic and institutional development. I co-direct the Global Poverty Research Lab at Northwestern University and founded the independent China Econ Lab.

Professor Qian’s research investigates the drivers of long-run economic, culture and political evolution. She has studied the causes and consequences of formal institutions, such as elections, and cultural norms, and gender preference and racial identity. She uses theory-driven frameworks and empirical evidence to resolve historical puzzles, such as the causes of the Great Chinese and Soviet Famines, or the presence of local democracy within autocratic regimes.

Her work spans many current and historical contexts such as China, the United States, former Eastern Bloc countries and sub-Saharan Africa. Her work has been published in top academic journals and featured in media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal and National Public Radio. She is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow, as well the recipient of many prestigious awards and grants. She serves in several editorial positions and has consulted for agencies such as The World Bank, the Global Development Network and the China Development Bank.

Her non-academic writings can be found here.

Amy Yee is an award-winning journalist, currently with Chicago Sun-Times covering the economy, business, and labor. She is a former staff reporter and foreign correspondent for the Financial Times in New York and India, as well as for Bloomberg/ CityLab writing about inequality in the US and solutions to social problems.
Amy has also written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, NPR and 30+ US and UK media outlets. She has reported from more than 20 countries, including ten in Africa, as well as India, Bangladesh and Nepal.

Amy is the author of the nonfiction book “Far From the Rooftop of the World” with a Foreword by the Dalai Lama, about Tibetan refugees in India and beyond.

She has won three awards from the United Nations Correspondents Association for reporting on climate change solutions in Bangladesh; first place from the Association of Healthcare Journalists for articles about reducing deaths of children in India and Bangladesh; and four awards from the South Asian Journalists Association.

In 2023 she won the Asian American Journalists Association’s award for reporting about protecting rights of immigrant voters in Philadelphia; a Society of Professional Journalists award for racial equity reporting; and Chicago Journalists Association’s award for best Business story about equitable small business loans.

More about her is at amyyeewrites.com.