Pallavi Prabhakar

Pallavi Prabhakar is a 3rd year PhD student at the Department of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics. She is also affiliated to FAIR- Centre for Experimental Research on Fairness, Inequality, and Rationality, Norway and BRAC Institute of Governance and Development (BIGD), Dhaka. Her research interests encompass Development Economics, Applied Microeconomics, Impact Evaluation, Behavioral Economics, Political Economics, Experimental Economics and Family Economics. Specifically, her research focuses on finding solutions to development challenges in Uganda, India and Tanzania through experimental methods. In India, she is undertaking a Randomized Controlled Trial (RCT) evaluating whether and how voter’s change their beliefs about state performance and level of political engagement, after being informed about the relative performance of their districts against development indicators on health, education and infrastructure. In Tanzania, she is working on a clustered multi-arm RCT targeting pregnant mothers in Tanzania. Following the study sample until the target children are 1 year old, the study tests the relative causal effect of a digitally supported early childhood development intervention delivered by CHWs; a digital unconditional cash transfers to relax financial resource constraints; and a combination of the two. It will also assess whether targeting the cash to mothers has differential impacts on child development relative to targeting fathers of household heads. In Uganda, she is investigating the role of privacy of information as a casual mechanism for women’s economic empowerment in context of cash transfer programs. Previously, she has been a Visiting Fellow at CEGA, Berkeley and Indian Statistical Institute, India. Pallavi brings substantial field research experience from being a Senior Research Associate at BRAC in Uganda and as a Development Analyst with Oxford Policy Management. 

Pallavi is currently on a research visit at the CSAE, University of Oxford, where she is supervised by Professor Abigail Adams Pratt.”