Asim Ijaz Khwaja

Asim Ijaz Khwaja is Director of the Center for International Development at Harvard University, the Sumitomo-Foundation for Advanced Studies on International Development Professor of International Finance and Development at the Harvard Kennedy School, and co-founder of the Center for Economic Research in Pakistan (CERP).

His areas of interest include economic development, finance, education, political economy, institutions, and contract theory/mechanism design. His research combines extensive fieldwork, rigorous empirical analysis, and microeconomic theory to answer questions that are motivated by and engage with policy.

Recent Publications

Crowding in Private Quality: The Equilibrium Effects of Public Spending in Education (with T. Andrabi, N. Bau, J. Das, and N. Karachiwalla), Forthcoming, Quarterly Journal of Economics.

Trust in State and Non-State Actors: Evidence from Dispute Resolution in Pakistan (with D. Acemoglu, A. Cheema and J. Robinson), Journal of Political Economy, August 2020.

Making Moves Matter: Experimental Evidence on Incentivizing Bureaucrats through Performance-Based Postings (with A. Khan, LSE, and B. Olken, MIT), American Economic Review, Vol. 109, No. 1, January 2019. Link to Online Appendix.

Upping the Ante: The Equilibrium Effects of Unconditional Grants to Private Schools ( with T. Andrabi, J. Das, S. Ozyurt, and N. Singh), American Economic Review, Vol. 110 (10): 3315-49, 2020.

Report Cards: The Impact of Providing School and Child Test Scores on Education Markets. (with T. Andrabi, Pomona, and J. Das), American Economic Review, Vol. 107, No. 6, June 2017.

Screening Peers Softly: Inferring the Quality of Small Borrowers, (with R. Iver, MIT, E. Luttmer, Dartmouth, and K. Shue, Chicago GSB) Management Science, Vol. 62(6), June 2016.

Tax Farming Redux: Experimental Evidence on Performance Pay for Tax Collectors (with A. Khan, LSE, and B. Olken, MIT), Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 131, No. 1, February 2016.