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, norms, and human capital.

I am on the job market this year (2023/24).

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

Winner of Weiss Family NEUDC Distinguished Paper 2023, Harvard Kennedy School
Coverage: [VoxTalks Economics] [Ideas of India]

Publications

Critical Periods in Cognitive and Socioemotional Development: Evidence from Weather Shocks in Indonesia
(Forthcoming, The Economic Journal)

Working papers

Transforming Harmful Social Norms: The Effect of Reducing Menstrual Stigma on Health Behaviours and Girls’ Education with Karen Macours and Julieta Vera Rueda

Psychological Mechanisms for Eliciting Preferences and Beliefs with Evan Friedman and Suanna Oh

Policy publications

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) 

Effective Altruism - I've written a framework outlining the tradeoff faced when trying to affect the long-run future here.