C. Austin Davis
Assistant Professor · School of International Service · American University
I am a development economist. Much of my research asks how the movement of people shapes, and is shaped by, economic conditions, particularly for marginalized populations. I study what drives displacement, such as the economic motives behind state violence against the Rohingya in Myanmar, and what migration means for the households and communities it touches, from refugee camps in Bangladesh to labor migrants leaving the Philippines. A second line of work examines women’s employment in Brazil, including how the drop in births after the Zika epidemic reshaped women’s work and family life. A third asks what happens to anti-poverty programs as they grow from small trials into national policy. Across these, I combine large administrative datasets with original surveys and field experiments.
I am an Invited Researcher at J-PAL, a Research Affiliate of the Yale Research Initiative on Innovation and Scale (Y-RISE), and Academic Lead of the Y-RISE and IPA Workforce Development Initiative. I am also a principal investigator on the Cox’s Bazar Panel Survey, a public panel of Rohingya refugee and host-community households in Bangladesh. I was a postdoctoral associate at Yale’s MacMillan Center from 2017 to 2020 and received my PhD in economics from the University of Michigan.
Selected work
