Tavneet Suri is an associate professor of applied economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. She is a development economist, with a regional focus on sub-Saharan Africa. Her research centers on agriculture, household financial access, and informal risk sharing, as well as governance and political participation. A large body of her work focuses on the constraints to technology adoption in agriculture. She has also conducted a lot of research on the impacts of mobile money and applications of the mobile money platform for credit contracts (such as trade credit and credit for solar panels). Recent work has focused on governance issues in the Kibera slum in Nairobi and a large-scale field experiment she conducted in Kenya during the 2013 general election. She spends a lot of time in the field, collecting her own data, primarily in Kenya, Sierra Leone, and Rwanda. Suri is the scientific director for Africa for the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL); a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER); an affiliate of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD) and the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR); and co-director of the Agriculture Research Program at the International Growth Center. Suri holds a BA in economics from Trinity College, Cambridge University, as well as an MA in international and development economics, an MPhil in economics, and a PhD in economics from Yale University.
