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PhD Student
Expertise: development, environmental economics
18 February 2026
Oriana Bandiera, Robin Burgess, Anton Heil and Munshi Sulaiman
Poverty traps are among the most influential yet elusive ideas in economics. This chapter reviews the challenges involved in identifying poverty traps and surveys the progress made over the past quarter century. It exami... Read more...
01 May 2022
Clare Balboni, Oriana Bandiera, Robin Burgess, Maitreesh Ghatak and Anton Heil
There are two broad views as to why people stay poor. One emphasizes differences in fundamentals, such as ability, talent, or motivation. The poverty traps view emphasizes differences in opportunities that stem from acce... Read more...
01 May 2021
Clare Balboni, Robin Burgess, Anton Heil, Jonathan Old and Benjamin Olken
This paper examines the link between electoral incentives and environmental degradation by exploiting a satellite dataset on 107,000 forest fires and 879 asynchronous district elections in Indonesia. Fires represent a ch... Read more...
09 March 2020
There are two views as to why people stay poor. The equal opportunity view emphasizes that differences in individual traits like talent or motivation make the poor choose low productivity jobs. The poverty traps view e... Read more...
