5th Urbanization and Poverty Reduction Research Conference

CONFERENCE ORGANIZERS

Harris Selod

Harris Selod is a Senior Economist with the Development Research Group of the World Bank. His current research focuses on urban development, including issues related to transport and land use, as well as land tenure, land markets and the political economy of the land sector in developing countries, with a specific interest in West Africa. His publications appear in a variety of journals such as the American Economic Journal, the Economic Journal, the Journal of Public Economics, the Journal of Development Economics or the Journal of Urban Economics, and cover a variety of topics in urban and public economics including theories of squatting and residential informality, the political economy of transport infrastructure, the effects of residential segregation on schooling and unemployment, or the impact of land rights formalization and place-based policies. Prior to joining the World Bank in 2007, he was an associate professor at the Paris School of Economics and a researcher at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA). He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Paris Panthéon-Sorbonne and graduated from the Ecole Nationale de la Statistique et de l’Administration Economique (ENSAE) and the Ecole Supérieure de Commerce de Paris (ESCP).

Rémi Jedwab

Rémi Jedwab is an associate professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Elliott School and the Department of Economics of George Washington University. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the Paris School of Economics. He was also a visiting Ph.D. student at the London School of Economics for three years. Professor Jedwab's main field of research is urban economics, though his work also has strong development economics, economic history, trade, environmental economics and public economics themes. Some of the issues he has studied include urbanization and structural transformation, the economic effects of transportation infrastructure, and agricultural and economic development in the developing world, and Sub‐Saharan Africa in particular. His research has been published in the American Economic Review, the Review of Economics and Statistics, the Economic Journal, the Journal of Economic Growth and the Journal of Urban Economics. Recently, Professor Jedwab’s research areas have included the phenomenon of urbanization without economic growth, and his research has been highlighted by The Atlantic's CityLab and the Boston Globe.

Edward Glaeser

Edward Glaeser is the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard, where he also serves as Director of the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston. He studies the economics of cities, and has written scores of articles on urban issues, including the growth of cities, segregation, crime, and housing markets. He has been particularly interested in the role that geographic proximity can play in creating knowledge and innovation. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1992 and has been at Harvard since then.

Chris Papageorgiou

Chris Papageorgiou is the Division Chief in the Development Macroeconomics division of the IMF’s Research Department. He is also the coordinator of IMF-DFID Low-Income Country Research Program. Since joining the Fund in 2006, he has done mission work in Africa, Western Hemisphere, and Asia and Pacific, and has led IMF policy work on a variety of developing country issues. His analytical work is primarily focused on economic growth and international macroeconomics. He has published extensively, and is an associate editor of the European Economic Review and the IMF Economic Review.

KEYNOTE SPEAKER

Esteban Rossi-Hansberg

Esteban Rossi-Hansberg is the Theodore A. Well '29 Professor of Economics at Princeton University, where he has been since 2005. Prior to Princeton he was an Assistant Professor at Stanford University. He graduated from the University of Chicago in 2002. His research specializes in international trade, regional and urban economics, as well as growth and organizational economics. He has published extensively in all the major journals in economics. In 2007 he received the Alfred Sloan Research Fellowship and in 2010 he received the August Lösch Prize and the Geoffrey Hewings Award. He is a fellow of the Economteric Society, a member of the NBER and CEPR and is, or has been, an associate editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the American Economic Review, the Journal of Monetary Economics and the Journal of Urban Economics, among other journals.

PANELISTS

Shanta Devarajan

Previously, he was the Chief Economist of the World Bank’s Middle East and North Africa Region. Since joining the World Bank in 1991, he has been a Principal Economist and Research Manager for Public Economics in the Development Research Group, and the Chief Economist of the Human Development Network, the South Asia Region and Africa Region. He was a director of the World Development Report 2004, Making Services Work for Poor People. Before 1991, he was on the faculty of Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. A member of the Overseas Development Institute’s Board of Trustees, and the author or co-author of more than 100 publications, Mr. Devarajan’s research covers public economics, trade policy, natural resources and the environment, and general equilibrium modeling of developing countries.

Tatiana Gallego Lizon

Tatiana Gallego Lizon is the Division Chief for Housing and Urban Development at the Climate Change and Sustainable Development Sector of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). She previously worked at the Asian Development Bank (ADB) where she held various positions, including as Director of the Urban Development and Water Division of the Southeast Asian Department, where she pioneered agendas on urban climate change resilience, cross-border economic zones and corridor town development. She has also worked in the Private Sector and in Research. Gallego holds a PhD and a MEng in Environmental Engineering from Imperial College, London and a PGD in Policy Studies from the School of African and Oriental Studies.

Pinelopi Goldberg

Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg is the Elihu Professor of Economics at Yale University. She was the Editor-in-Chief of the American Economic Review from 2011 to 2016, and Coeditor in 2017 and from 2007 to 2010. She is currently Vice-President of the American Economic Association, Member of the Executive Committee of the Econometric Society, and President of the Eastern Economic Association.

Aisa Kirabo Kacyira

Aisa Kirabo Kacyira is Deputy Executive Director and Assistant Secretary-General for UN-HABITAT, providing critical leadership to promote sustainable cities and human settlements globally. She has over 15 years in senior management and strategic leadership in Government and non-governmental institutions, both national and international. Before joining UN-Habitat at the end of 2011, Dr. Kacyira was the Governor of the Eastern Province of Rwanda. Previously, she was Mayor of Kigali (2006-2011), one of the fastest urbanizing cities in the world. Under Dr. Kirabo’s leadership, Kigali won the UN-HABITAT Scroll of Honour Award in 2008 in recognition of high level of cleanliness, greenness and safety, and sustainable, affordable housing initiatives combined with pro-poor urban employment opportunities.

Christopher Williams

Chris Williams is the Director of the UN-Habitat New York Liaison Office. He is a development practitioner with over twenty-five years of experience in international organizations in Africa, Asia and the Americas and with training in economics and sociology. Prior to UN-Habitat, Mr. Williams served as Executive Director of the Water Supply and Sanitation Collaborative Council (WSSCC) in Geneva for five years. He also held senior posts in global fund management, advocacy, fund raising and policy research, and worked on programmes to upgrade water, sanitation and shelter in settlements.

CHAIRS

Maggie Chen

Maggie Xiaoyang Chen is the Director of the Institute for International Economic Policy and Professor of Economics and International Affairs at George Washington University. Professor Chen's areas of research expertise include foreign direct investment, international trade, and regional trade agreements and her work has been published extensively in academic journals. She has worked as an economist in the research department of the World Bank, a consultant for various divisions of the World Bank and the International Finance Cooperation, and a trade policy advisor at the U.S. congressional Budget Office leading policy analyses on the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement. She has also held visiting professor positions in various universities including Boston College and University of International Business and Economics in Beijing, China and is a co-editor of the Economic Inquiry. Professor Chen received her Ph.D. and M.A. in Economics from the University of Colorado at Boulder and her B.A. in Economics from Beijing Normal University.

Asli Demirgüç-Kunt

Asli Demirgüç-Kunt is the Director of Research at the World Bank. After joining the Bank in 1989 as a Young Economist, she has held different positions, including Director of Development Policy, Chief Economist of Financial and Private Sector Development Network, and Senior Research Manager, doing research and advising on financial sector and private sector development issues. She is the lead author of the World Bank Policy Research Report 2007 Finance for All? Policies and Pitfalls in Expanding Access and has also created the World Bank’s Global Financial Development Report. Her research has focused on the links between financial development and firm performance and economic development. Banking crises, financial regulation, access to financial services, and inclusion including SME finance are among her areas of research.

Marianne Fay

Marianne Fay is the chief economist for climate change at the World Bank. She co-directed the World Development Report 2010 on Climate Change. Ms. Fay has served in multiple regions in the World Bank, including Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, and Africa, working on infrastructure, urbanization, and more recently on climate change and green growth. Her research has explored the role of infrastructure and urbanization in development, with a particular focus on urban poverty, climate change, and green growth, on which she has authored numerous articles and books. As chief economist for sustainable development, she led the World Bank’s flagship report for the Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development, Inclusive Green Growth: The Pathway to Sustainable Development.

Anna Wellenstein

Anna Wellenstein is Director for Strategy, Operations, Land and Geospatial in the Social, Urban, Rural and Resilience Global Practice of the World Bank. The group works with national and local governments and with communities to reduce urban poverty, expand access to services, and make cities more resilient and economically productive. Ms. Wellenstein was previously Practice Manager for Latin America and the Caribbean in the Disaster Risk Management and Urban Development unit, and through her role she guided a team to support governments in the preparation and implementation of projects and for top analytics and technical assistance. From 2009 to 2012, she acted as the Washington DC based manager for the World Bank programs in India, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives. Between 2008 and 2009, she advised the Bank’s Managing Director overseeing the portfolios for Latin America and the Caribbean, East Asia and the Pacific, and the Middle East and North Africa. Ms. Wellenstein previously oversaw the World Bank’s portfolio of infrastructure and urban projects in Mexico and Colombia. She has been active in design, financing and implementation of urban development, infrastructure and housing projects for twenty years.

PRESENTERS

Julia Bird

Julia Bird is a postdoctoral researcher in economics at the University of Oxford. Her research seeks to explore the changing patterns of urbanisation observed over recent decades, with a focus on Sub-Saharan Africa. In particular, she is interested in the location decisions of firms and people within and across urban areas, how they interact and generate agglomeration economies, and how these spatial patterns are impacted by policies such as infrastructure investments. She previously completed a PhD at Toulouse School of Economics, France.

Jan Brueckner

Jan K. Brueckner (AB, UC Berkeley; PhD, Stanford University) was long- time faculty member at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before coming to University of California, Irvine in 2005. Brueckner has published extensively in the reas of urban economics, public economics, housing finance, and the economics of the airline industry, with more than 125 journal articles to his credit. He is also author of an innovative new textbook, Lectures on Urban Economics (MIT Press, 2011). Brueckner served as editor of the Journal of Urban Economics for 16 years and is currently a member of the editorial boards of 6 journals. He has served as a consultant to the World Bank, many of the major airlines, and other organizations.

Douglas Gollin

Doug Gollin’s research focusses on economic development and growth, with particular interests in agriculture and structural transformation. His work brings a general equilibrium perspective to issues such as: sectoral differences in productivity; the impacts of agricultural technologies; the role of transport costs in shaping spatial patterns of development; the importance of small firms and self-employment in poor countries; and the macroeconomic effects of disease. Doug Gollin holds an AB degree from Harvard University and an MA from Yale University. He received his PhD in economics from the University of Minnesota in 1996.

Vernon Henderson

J. Vernon Henderson joined the London School of Economics in September 2013 as School Professor of Economic Geography, having previously been Eastman Professor of Political Economy at Brown University, USA. His research focuses on urbanization in developing countries, looking both within and across cities and regions. He is the co-PI of a major research project on urbanization policy in Africa, as well as globally, situated at LSE and Oxford. His current research looks at topics such as expressway development and city growth in China, the dynamics of investment in the built environment in cities, how colonial legacy affects sprawl and the spatial layout of cities, and the impact of democratization in Africa on city growth and health and education outcomes across the urban political hierarchy. His work is published in journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Review of Economic Studies, Science and Journal of Development Economics. He is co-editor of the Journal of Urban Economics and the Handbook of Regional and Urban Economics, and serves on a number of editorial boards. He is a founder and past President of the Urban Economics Association. Over the years, he has worked with governments in Asia and Africa directly or indirectly through institutions such as the World Bank on formulating urban policies.

Matthew Kahn

Matthew E. Kahn is a Professor at the UCLA Institute of the Environment, the Department of Economics, and the Department of Public Policy. He is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Before joining the UCLA faculty in January 2007, he taught at Columbia and the Fletcher School at Tufts University. He has served as a Visiting Professor at Harvard and Stanford. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago. He is the author of Green Cities: Urban Growth and the Environment (Brookings Institution Press 2006) and the co-author of Heroes and Cowards: The Social Face of War (Princeton University Press 2009). His research focuses on environmental, urban, real estate and energy economics.

Martina Kirchberger

Martina is an Assistant Professor of Economics at Trinity College Dublin and a Research Associate at the Centre for the Study of African Economies at the University of Oxford. She is a development economist with a particular interest in urbanization, infrastructure and mobility. Most of her research uses geo-referenced individual level data that she combines with environmental data. She is also working on the cost of transport infrastructure and public procurement. In part of her recent work she explores the use of big data, such as mobile phone data, to answer questions in development. Her research has been published in the Journal of Development Economics and the World Bank Economic Review. Previously, she was an Earth Institute Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at Columbia University. She received her DPhil in Economics from the University of Oxford in 2014.

Somik Lall

Somik V. Lall is a Lead Economist for Urban Development at the World Bank's Urban Development and Resilience Unit in the Sustainable Development Network. He is the lead author of a World Bank report on urbanization "Planning, Connecting, and Financing Cities Now: Priorities for City Leaders." He was a core team member of the 2009 World Development Report "Reshaping Economic Geography", and recently Senior Economic Counsellor to the Indian Prime Minister's National Transport Development Policy Committee. Somik currently leads a World Bank program on the Urbanization Reviews, which provides diagnostic tools and a policy framework for policymakers to manage rapid urbanization and city development. His research interests span urban and spatial economics, infrastructure development, and public finance. He has over 40 publications featuring in peer reviewed journals, edited volumes, and working papers. Somik holds a bachelors degree in engineering, masters in city planning, and doctorate in economics and public policy.

Prakash Loungani

Prakash Loungani is an advisor in the IMF’s Independent Evaluation Office. He is a macroeconomist with broad interests, including in housing markets. He developed the IMF’s Global Housing Watch, a website dedicated to showcasing the institution’s work on housing markets. In 2015, he co-edited a special issue of the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking on “Housing, Stability, and the Macroeconomy: International Perspectives” based on a conference organized with the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. He also co-organized conferences in 2014 on “Housing Markets and the Macroeconomy: Challenges for Monetary Policy and Financial Stability” with the Deutsche Bundesbank and the German Research Foundation and on “Housing Markets, Financial Stability and Growth” with the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. He is the author of “Global House Prices: Time to Worry Again?” (IMF Blog, Dec. 2016).

DISCUSSANTS

Leah Brooks

Leah Brooks is Assistant Professor in the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration at the George Washington University. After receiving her PhD from UCLA in 2005, she taught at the University of Toronto and McGill University, and worked at the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Her research interest is urban political economy. Her work to date has examined Business Improvement Districts to understand the resolution of collective action problems, and the Community Development Block Grant program to analyze the political economy of grant giving at the municipal and sub-municipal levels. She has documented the existence and analyzed the impacts of municipally-imposed tax and expenditure limits, studied the premium required to assemble land, analyzed the long-term effects of streetcars on urban form, and is hard at work examining the impact of containerization on cities.

Mariaflavia Harari

Mariaflavia (Nina) Harari is an Assistant Professor of Real Estate at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, specializing in urban economics and development economics. Her research agenda is centered on urbanization in developing countries. Her current projects focus on urban structure in India and slums in Indonesia. She holds a PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a B.A. and a M.Sc. in Economics and Social Sciences from Bocconi University.

Deniz Igan

Deniz Igan is the Deputy Chief in the Research Department's Macro-Financial Division. Previously, she worked in the Western Hemisphere Department and the European Department. Her research interests include corporate finance, banking, real estate, political economy, financial crises, and financial regulation.