Our New Editorial Board!

It is our pleasure to announce the new editorial team for Economics That Really Matters! This blog, housed at Cornell University, has been a platform for sharing research ideas and findings in development economics since 2015. With new Co-Editors-In-Chief Vanisha Sharma and Tess Lallemant, and Assistant Editors Francisco Flores and Jahnvi Verma, we are excited to expand this blog further! We have a great line-up of exciting content coming up in the next few weeks, and it has been thrilling to see a progressively increasing reader base. 

Development economists seek to understand the causes of poverty and inequality and how to promote sustainable and inclusive economic growth. As the world has changed, with the advent of globalization, rapid advances in technology, and the increasing urgency of climate change, development economics has grown and evolved as well. The discipline has expanded its scope to include research on topics such as information and communication technology, the impact of climate change, and behavioral economics. To keep up with the changing times and better understand how to address the challenges faced by different regions and communities, it’s important to keep asking “What is development economics?” 

To answer this,  in addition to the traditional blog posts, we will be introducing an ‘Interviews’ section where we ask renowned experts in the field about their research experiences and general advice for grad students pursuing a career in development economics (stay tuned for our first interview with Prof. Chris Barrett this May!). We have also worked on developing the website to optimize the search process for our readers. 

We hope to continue to enable in-depth discussions about the current problems and possible solutions in development economics, and would love to hear suggestions/feedback from our readers. Please feel free to reach out to us on twitter @econthatmatters, or you can contact any of our following team members. Get to know them better:

Co-Editor-Chief

Vanisha Sharma is a fifth-year PhD candidate at Cornell’s Applied Economics and Management program. She is fascinated with digitization of rural communities and randomized control trials, as evidenced by her job-market paper on social (media) learning in Indian farmers. You can learn more about her at vanisha-sharma.com. 

Co-Editor-Chief

Tess Lallemant is a third-year PhD student at Cornell’s Applied Economics and Management program. She focuses her research on development and labor economics, with a particular interest in East Africa and access to higher education. Prior to joining Cornell, she completed her master’s degree in Agricultural and Consumer Economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Assistant Editor

Francisco Flores is a third-year PhD student at Cornell’s Applied Economics and Management program. His academic interests are on understanding how economic and climate shocks impact on rural households and how they adapt. Prior to joining Cornell, he completed his master’s degree in Food and Agricultural Economics from Michigan State University.

Assistant Editor

Jahnvi Verma is a Master’s student at Cornell’s Applied Economics and Management program. Her primary academic focus centers around comprehending development and public policy challenges through a behavioral perspective. Prior to joining Cornell, she completed her bachelor’s degree in Economics from NMIMS University, India.

We are excited for this opportunity and look forward to engaging with our audience. Check out our last post here. You can also subscribe to be notified right away when we post new content.