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Development Economics

Northwestern has a fast-growing, dynamic group of faculty working in the area of economic development. Development economics increasingly emphasizes research that integrates cutting-edge theory and first-rate empirical work, and Northwestern's development community benefits from interaction with the theory, econometrics, and labor groups within the department, as well as the Mathematical Economics and Decision Sciences, Finance and Management and Strategy groups within the Kellogg School of Management, and the labor and education economists in the School of Education. The department has a weekly Applied Microeconomics seminar and additionally, development faculty and students often attend seminars held by the Institute for Policy Research (IPR), and other departmental field seminars such as theory, macroeconomics, and econometrics.

Within the economics department, Northwestern's development faculty includes affiliates of major research organizations such as the National Bureau for Economic Research (NBER) and Centre for Economic Policy Research, as well as leading development organizations including the Bureau for Research and Economics Analysis of Development (BREAD), Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), and the International Growth Centre.

In an exciting development, 2011 saw the creation of the Center for the Study of Development Economics (CSDE), a research center based in the economics department and dedicated to top-quality empirical development research. The Center for International Macroeconomics (CIM), a joint venture of the Economics Department and Kellogg School of Management's finance group, also funds research in development economics. These affiliations and resources put Northwestern's faculty at the heart of field-based data collection, including surveys, field experiments, and field-based lab experiments.  In 2017, CSDE joined forces with the newly created Global Poverty Research Lab, housed in the Buffett Institute for Global Studies.