Dean Karlan

Dean Karlan, co-director of the Global Poverty Research Lab, is a Buffett Institute Faculty Fellow and the Nemmers Distinguished Professor of Economics and Finance at the Kellogg School of Management.

His research focuses on microeconomic issues of poverty, typically employing experimental methodologies and behavioral economics insights to examine what works, what does not and why in interventions in sustainable income generation for those in poverty, household and entrepreneurial finance, health behavior, and charitable giving. He works on issues for low-income households in both developing countries and the United States.

He is the president and founder of Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), a nonprofit organization dedicated to discovering and promoting solutions to global poverty problems, and working to scale up successful ideas through implementation and dissemination to policymakers, practitioners, investors and donors. In 2015, he founded ImpactMatters, a nonprofit dedicated to producing impact audits, which assess whether an organization uses and produces appropriate evidence of impact.