Rohini Pande, Mohammed Kamal Professor of Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School

Rohini Pande is Mohamed Kamal Professor of Public Policy and the faculty chair of the development area at Harvard Kennedy School. Prior to joining the Kennedy School she was an Associate Professor of Economics at Yale University. She has taught at Yale University, MIT, and Columbia. Her research focuses on the economic analysis of the politics and consequences of different forms of redistribution, principally in developing countries. A Rhodes Scholar, she is the recipient of several NSF grants, the Russell Sage Presidential Award (with Lena Edlund), and the Royal Economic Society Junior Research Fellowship. She holds a PhD and MSc in economics from the London School of Economics, an MA in philosophy, politics, and economics from Oxford, and a BA in economics from St. Stephens College, Delhi University.

Together, Professors Khwaja and Pande serve as the co-directors of Evidence for Policy Design (EPoD), a dynamic and rapidly growing research program at the Center for International Development at Harvard that promotes  the use of rigorous evidence to inform the design of public policies in low-income countries.  http://www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/cid/programs/evidence-for-policy-design

Research Assistant Skills: A research assistant  is needed to assist with core activities at EPoD including policy outreach, course development, communications, organization of research resources and research dissemination.  This is an opportunity to learn about and contribute to the various activities involved in conducting, supporting and promoting evidence-based policy research.  The RA will be expected to perform background research, contribute to program documents and training/teaching materials, organize research resources, and complete other tasks to support the operations and growth of EPoD, under the guidance of the program team. The RA may also contribute to specific research projects, based on project needs and the RA's interests.  

Background in economics or international development extremely helpful. RA must have good writing skills, excellent research skills, and the ability to be creative in their research and presentation of information. The RA also MUST be organized, dependable, and be willing to provide status updates to the Professors and other team members. 

2012 Research Assistant Reflections:

My research assistantship for Prof. Rohini Pande allowed me to further my interest in development economics and put to use the skills I learned in a sequence of geospatial analysis courses in the Government department, Gov 98dn and Gov 1016. I worked on two projects, both related to the evaluation of microfinance programs. The first assignment was to clean data related to a microfinance experiment in South India, through which I learned a great deal about experimental protocol for microfinance evaluation as well as the process of merging Census of India data with field-collected data. The second assignment was to help generate spatial statistical information for the evaluation of a microfinance observational study in Ahmedabad, Pakistan. On that assignment, I was able to use my specialized skills in geospatial analysis to partition in the study area into cells for the assessment of spatial autocorrelation. This was a great way to refresh my skills in ArcGIS and to use the spatial statistics packages of the ubiquitous statistical software, R. Coincidentally, this was also the first year of a 5-week International Development workshop run by Evidence for Policy Design, which I learned about through this research assistantship and was able to participate in. All in all, this was a great experience that gave me a chance to use my skills as a statistics concentrator to help with international development related projects.

-Rebecca Goldstein ‘13

I recently finished writing a program to clean the survey data for Professor Pande's research on microfinance firms in Tanjore. I'm currently working on a program for another level of cleaning. In addition to practising valuable Stata programming skills, I enjoyed interacting with EPoD (Evidence for Policy Design) research associates and talking with them about their research.

Janet Lu ‘14

2011 Research Assistant Reflection:

Professor Pande was investigating the efficiency of various microfinance loan structures in order to demonstrate that debt contracts assist small-scale enterprises. In particular, she uses field experiments to estimate the impact of varying loan term structures. As her Research Assistant, I cleaned the data set compiled from the field experiments and ran preliminary summary statistics and regressions. I then created power point presentations of my analyses. 

One valuable aspect of this internship was that Professor Pande explained the context of her research. That is, she assigned me reading which taught me about the current microfinance debate and how her research contributes to it. It was very interesting to work with a Professor who is developing working papers; students are often hired as Research Assistants during the beginning stages of projects or during editing. So this was a unique and valuable experience because I observed how Professor Pande is improving her empirical analysis and addressing new elements of her project. Finally, I enjoyed this experience because I interacted with Professor Pande’s Research Fellow, Jeanette Park. Throughout the research process Jeanette was very responsive and helped me improve my statistical software skills. Overall this was been an awesome opportunity!

-Ioana Calcev ‘12