Dean Karlan

Dean Karlan is an American development economist. He is Chief Economist of USAID and Professor of Economics and Finance at Northwestern University where, alongside Christopher Udry, he co-founded and co-directs the Global Poverty Research Lab at Kellogg School of Management. Karlan is the president and founder of Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), a New Haven, Connecticut, based research outfit dedicated to creating and evaluating solutions to social and international development problems. He is also a Research Fellow and member of the Executive Committee of the board of directors at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Along with economists Jonathan Morduch and Sendhil Mullainathan, Karlan served as director of the Financial Access Initiative (FAI), a consortium of researchers focused on substantially expanding access to quality financial services for low-income individuals.

On 15 of November 2022 he was nominated USAID Chief Economist

Together with Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Michael Kremer, John A. List, and Sendhil Mullainathan, he has been a driving force in advancing field experiments as an important methodology to discover causal relationships in economics. He is also a co-founder of stickK.com and co-founder of ImpactMatters, which, counter to other evaluators which focus on overhead costs, instead prioritized cost-effectiveness analysis.