Duncan Webb
I'm a PhD student at the Paris School of Economics. I am a development economist who uses tools and insights from behavioural economics. My current projects focus on discrimination, social change, and human capital.
Later this year I'll be joining Princeton University as a postdoctoral scholar, before joining NovaSBE as an Assistant Professor in 2025.
Upcoming trips: Rookiefest, Northwestern University, April 2024.
I spent 2022-23 as a visiting scholar at MIT, and 2021 at UC Berkeley, and I'm a Global Priorities Fellow supported by the Forethought Foundation.
Research
Job market paper
Silence to Solidarity: Using Group Dynamics to Reduce Anti-Transgender Discrimination in India [PSE WP]
Winner of Weiss Family NEUDC Distinguished Paper 2023, Harvard Kennedy School
Coverage: [VoxTalks Economics] [Ideas of India]
Working papers
Menstrual Stigma, Hygiene, and Human Capital: Experimental Evidence from Madagascar with Karen Macours and Julieta Vera Rueda
Psychological Mechanisms for Eliciting Preferences and Beliefs
with Evan Friedman and Suanna Oh
Publications
Critical Periods in Cognitive and Socioemotional Development: Evidence from Weather Shocks in Indonesia [Ungated]
The Economic Journal, 2023
COVID-19 spread, detection, and dynamics in Bogota, Colombia
Nature Communications, 2021
with Rachid Laajaj et al.
Coverage: [Blu] [Caracol] [Caracol 2] [Nuevo Siglo]
Understanding how socioeconomic inequalities drive inequalities in COVID-19 infections
Scientific Reports, 2022
with Rachid Laajaj et al.
Coverage: [Espectador] [Blu]
Presented at: Health Secretary of Colombia, Mayor's Office of Bogota
Code and other resources
dups - an R package for dealing with duplicates
trackr - an R package that helps you easily track the results of dplyr functions
qval - an R package that helps with multiple hypothesis testing by calculating FDR-adjusted p-values in the style of Anderson (2008)
Longtermism - I've written a framework outlining the tradeoff faced when trying to affect the long-run future here.