Faculty Director
Deputy Directors
Christopher Blattman, Chang-Tai Hsieh
Description
Many low- and lower-middle-income countries confront a common set of challenges, and policymakers in those countries often lack access to reliable and relevant explanations and evidence to help inform decision-making.
- What is the right mix of policies, investments, and incentives needed to spur industrial growth?
- How can policymakers ensure that prosperity is widely distributed and addresses the most extreme forms of poverty?
- What policies promote more effective government and more free societies?
- How can societies prevent and respond to economic and political instability?
Together, these are the defining problems of the 21st century. They do not demand a new approach to economics or new tools. Instead, these problems demand that economists turn their attention, models, and analysis toward new places and a new set of questions.
The Development Economics Center brings together scholars from across the UChicago community for a collaborative, multi-disciplinary approach to addressing these challenges. Through rigorous research and active engagement with policymakers and stakeholders, UChicago scholars can push the frontiers of research and have real world impact.
The Center builds on the work of BFI’s Development Economics Research Initiative, expanding its support to include a new Development Economics Research Fund to prioritize development economics research by UChicago PhD students and junior faculty. The Development Economic Center also serves as a coordinating platform for the Development Innovation Lab (DIL) and the Weiss Fund for Research in Development Economics.
DEVELOPMENT ECONOMICS RESEARCH FUND
Call for Proposals
The Development Economics Research Fund (DERF) is financially supported by the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics at the University of Chicago and the Development Innovation Lab and aims to sponsor research in the field of development economics at the University of Chicago. Learn More
Affiliates
The Development Innovation Lab uses the tools of economics to develop innovations with the potential to benefit millions of people in low- and middle-income countries. We bring researchers in different fields together with governments, firms and non-profit organizations to identify, test, refine and scale innovations.
The Weiss Fund for Research in Development Economics supports research by students and ladder faculty working in development economics, broadly defined, funding projects that address a wide range of issues affecting less developed countries.
Associated Scholars
Michael Greenstone
Associated Working Papers
Associated Insights
Associated News
Other Research at BFI
- BFI-China
- Big Data Initiative
- Chicago Experiments Initiative
- Health Economics Initiative
- Industrial Organization Initiative
- Initiative for the Study of Gender in the Economy
- International Economics and Economic Geography Initiative
- MFR Program
- Macroeconomic Research Initiative
- Political Economics Initiative
- Price Theory Initiative
- Ronzetti Initiative for the Study of Labor Markets