Laura Schechter

My research looks at how social preferences impact economic outcomes in developing countries and how they can be harnessed to improve outcomes. Exposure to risk and limits placed on collective action by lack of trust both keep people poor and decrease health and economic well-being. One of my current projects (funded by the International Growth Centre) looks at how new monitoring technologies and incentive programs can encourage extension agents to increase their efforts to improve health and decrease inequality among Paraguayan farmers. In another ongoing project (funded by the Gates Foundation), I look at social learning and social interactions in the adoption of improved sanitation technologies by urban Africans and their impact on the health of urban families. An older, highly cited and utilized, area of my research looked at how to measure vulnerability and discussed why this was of interest above and beyond simply measuring poverty.

CDE Research Area Affiliations:

Demography of Inequality; Health and the Life Course

Selected Publications:

Deutschmann, Joshua W., Molly Lipscomb, Laura Schechter, and Jessica Zhu. “Spillovers without social interactions in urban sanitation.” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 16, no. 3 (2024): 482-515.

Schechter, Laura, and Srinivasan Vasudevan. “Persuading voters to punish corrupt vote-buying candidates: Experimental evidence from a large-scale radio campaign in India.” Journal of Development Economics 160 (2023): 102976.

Deutschmann, Joshua W., Jared Gars, Jean-François Houde, Molly Lipscomb, and Laura Schechter. “Privatization of public goods: Evidence from the sanitation sector in Senegal.“ Journal of Development Economics 160 (2023): 102971.