I am a Professor of Development Economics at the University of Manchester. Since my graduation from the Catholic University of Leuven with a PhD in Economics, I have worked in a number of countries, including France, Germany and the US. Prior to that I lived and worked for two years in India. As part of a three year project, sponsored by the British Academy, I have developed an academic network with four countries in Francophone West Africa. The project resulted in several subsequent research programmes. Much of my on-going research focuses on food security, labour markets in developing countries, social norms and intergenerational transfers.
I am particularly interested in behavioural field experiments. In 2016, as part of a second project, sponsored by the British Academy, Arnab Basu from Cornell University, Romane Viennet from OECD, a team of researchers from Ivory Coast and I derived experimentally a new measure of intra-household bargaining power in five villages in Ivory Coast and explored its implications for investments in child education. I am currently looking forward to the start of an EU-finded project, where Hanna Fromell from the University of Aarhus and I would be responsible for the experimental elicitation of norms in the context of migration in three African countries.
To give you an idea of what some of my earlier field work looked like, here is a short video from my trip to Ivory Coast in 2015. It covers some aspects of my research on food security and related social norms and governance issues.
