Tavneet Suri

Tavneet Suri is the Maurice F. Strong Career Development Professor and an Associate Professor of Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Suri is a development economist, with a regional focus on sub-Saharan Africa. Her research centers on agriculture, household financial access and informal risk sharing, and, more recently, governance and political participation.

A large body of her work focuses on the constraints to technology adoption in agriculture. She has also conducted a lot of research on the impacts of mobile money (for example, M-PESA in Kenya) and applications of the mobile money platform for credit contracts (e.g. trade credit and credit for solar panels). Her most recent work has focused on governance issues in the Kibera slum in Nairobi and a large scale field experiment she conducted in Kenya during the 2013 general election (the project where “they sent a million text messages, literally!”).

She spends a lot of time in the field, collecting her own data, primarily in Kenya, Sierra Leone and Rwanda. She is the Scientific Director for Africa for J-PAL; a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research; an affiliate of BREAD and CEPR; and co-director of the Agriculture Research Program at the International Growth Center. Suri holds a BA in economics from Trinity College, Cambridge University, as well as an MA in international and development economics, an MPhil in economics, and a PhD from Yale University.