Professor of Economics
Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak, a native of Bangladesh, is a professor of economics at Yale University, with concurrent appointments in the School of Management and in the Department of Economics. He is a member of the board of directors of the Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at MIT and serves as co-chair of its urban services initiative and of its environment & energy sector. He is the scientific advisor to Innovations for Poverty Action, Bangladesh, and serves as the academic lead for the Bangladesh Research Program for the International Growth Centre (IGC) at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Mobarak has several ongoing research projects in Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, India, Indonesia, Kenya, and Malawi. He conducts field experiments exploring ways to induce people in developing countries to adopt technologies or behaviors that are likely to be welfare improving. He also examines the implications of scaling up development interventions that are proven effective in such trials.
His research has been published in journals across disciplines, including Econometrica, Science, The Review of Economic Studies, American Political Science Review, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Demography. His work has been covered by The New York Times, The Economist, Science, NPR, Wired, BBC, The Wall Street Journal, The Times of London, and other media outlets around the world. He received a Carnegie Fellowship in 2017.
Mobarak is currently collaborating with Evidence Action in multiple countries to replicate, test, and scale his research program that encourages rural to urban seasonal migration to counter seasonal poverty. This program, called No Lean Season, is supported by GiveWell, Good Ventures, the Global Innovation Fund, and the start-up accelerator Y-Combinator.