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Job Market Candidate in Economics at Brown University
Job Market Candidate in Economics at Brown University
I am an applied microeconomist with an interest in development economics. I use randomized control trials and quasi-experimental methods to answer questions relating to poverty alleviation, structural transformation, health, and early childhood development. One theme throughout my work is that I create, unearth, or establish first access to unique, novel data sets.
My work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Weiss Fund, CEPR STEG, J-PAL, IPA, the Livelihood Impact Fund, and the Gates Foundation. I received my MPhil in Economics from the University of Oxford and a BSc Economics from Maastricht University. I am also a landscape and wildlife photographer.
moritz.poll [at] brown.edu | GitHub | Bluesky | Photography
Last updated October 2025
Poverty alleviation at high frequency
Poverty alleviation at high frequency
Abstract: I investigate one of the most impactful anti-poverty programs studied to date at unprecedented survey frequency, improving the measurement of core outcomes of interest and deepening our understanding of mechanisms and component complementarities. The program bundles small, monthly, unconditional cash transfers (UCTs), with entrepreneurship classes, one-on-one life skills coaching, formation of savings groups, and a large one-off seed capital grant for rural extreme poor. I conduct a large RCT in Malawi during which I track 1,500 households at fortnightly frequency across about 40,000 home visits. I find strong evidence that the livelihood components drive program success. UCTs reduce economic hardship promptly, while encouraging training attendance and protecting the seed capital from being consumed, allowing for remarkably high (re)investment rates, much higher than in pure cash transfer interventions. The program creates lasting impact without dependency: Once UCTs cease, households immediately replace them with newly generated income. The coaching component that aims to reduce the arrival rate of health and livelihood shocks appears to be ineffective: While households adopt preventive measures, shock arrival rates are nearly identical between the control and treatment group, even in an experimental arm where preventive behavior was particularly emphasized. The propensity to resort to severe coping behaviors in response to a shock increases by similar amounts in treatment and control. The program pays for itself in a matter of 27 months, which would have been dramatically over- or underestimated in traditional baseline-endline RCT designs that cannot measure earnings seasonality. Throughout, the high-frequency data enable conclusions about mechanisms that would have otherwise stayed opaque.
Publications
Publications
Stress, Ethnicity, and Prosocial Behavior
Stress, Ethnicity, and Prosocial Behavior
Journal of Political Economy Microeconomics (2023)
With Sara Lowes, Johannes Haushofer, Abednego Musau, David Ndetei, Nathan Nunn, and Nancy QianJournal of Political Economy Microeconomics (2023)
Abstract: While observational evidence suggests that people behave more prosocially towards members of their own ethnic group, many laboratory studies fail to find this effect. One possible explanation is that coethnic preference only emerges during times of stress. To test this hypothesis, we pharmacologically increase levels of the stress hormone cortisol, after which participants complete laboratory experiments with coethnics and noncoethnics. We find mixed evidence that increased cortisol decreases prosocial behavior. Coethnic preferences do not vary with cortisol. However, in contrast to previous studies, we find strong and robust evidence of coethnic preference.
Working Papers
Working Papers
Market Day Scheduling, Market Size, and Rural Economic Development
Market Day Scheduling, Market Size, and Rural Economic Development
Under Review
Under Review
Working paper – Best Paper Award from the Spatial Structures in the Social Sciences (S4) Institute
Abstract: Market days aggregate thin demand and supply across space and time, making them the pulse of all agrarian societies. In a natural experiment in Western Kenya, weekly market schedules were set quasi-randomly over the past century. This induced exogenous variation in spatial competition between nearby markets. I find that the resulting differences in market catchment areas have persistent, causal effects on present-day market attendance, population, and nighttime luminosity. Markets in this setting proliferated at a time when attendees were walking and potential gains from schedule harmonization are concentrated among markets that were recently connected to a road.
Abstract: Should entrepreneurship support programs to extremely poor people be scaled by saturating a few villages, or maintaining low saturation and enrolling more villages? On the one hand, saturation may create a critical mass of entrepreneurs whose income generation and associated spending multipliers make each other viable. On the other hand, encouraging the start-up of many small firms in close proximity may be a recipe for overcrowding and artificially fierce competition in a small village economy. In a large randomized control trial in Malawi, I exogenously vary the saturation of an entrepreneurship support program to assess whether business performance increases or decreases in the share of treated neighbors. Business performance is tracked at high frequency. Eighteen months after the start of the intervention, the majority of recipients have started retail businesses, the number of successful businesses scales linearly with the number of supported entrepreneurs to be, but the overall earnings do not appear to grow as saturation increases. Instead, aggregate earnings are split among the larger number of supported entrepreneurs. I show that the sectoral concentration is not driven by information frictions about other entrants' intended sectoral choice and the seed capital was provided in fungible cash. Instead, respondents highlight a lack of hard skills. The heightened competition does not lower consumer prices, but induces out-migration.
Work in Progress
Work in Progress
The role of shocks in poverty
The role of shocks in poverty
Fully funded, data collection ongoing
Fully funded, data collection ongoing
Abstract: In any narrative of persistent, extreme poverty, shocks loom large. Households living below the poverty line face an incessant onslaught of shocks to their health and livelihoods, their housing and assets, livestock and crops, infrastructure, or the social networks they are embedded in – each difficult to predict or prevent, each capable of wiping out the household’s progress toward lifting itself out of poverty. Our ability to formally model and study the role of shocks for turning poverty into a trap is inhibited by how challenging they are to recall and measure well in baseline-intervention-endline RCT frameworks. At the same time, Ultra-Poor Graduation programs (UPG) that support the diversification out of subsistence agriculture and into micro-entrepreneurship have emerged as the closest that development economics has come to a silver bullet for sustained ultra-poverty alleviation. The mechanisms behind their success are not well understood. I leverage the roll-out of a large UPG in Malawi to study the role of shocks in poverty and its alleviation. I conduct an RCT that generates unique high-frequency data of the shocks that households face. Random program assignment traces out the impact of (alleviated) poverty on the number, severity, and composition of shocks. An event-study analysis traces households' reactions to shocks. A structural model explores their interaction.
Seasons of change: Experimental evidence on the optimal timing for poverty alleviation
Seasons of change: Experimental evidence on the optimal timing for poverty alleviation
Fully funded, data collection ongoing
Fully funded, data collection ongoing
Abstract: In a large randomized control trial, I allocate an identical, bundled poverty alleviation program to three cohorts to receive either around the agricultural planting, harvest, or lean season. This study will illuminate the trade-offs between humanitarian pressures to cover basic needs when resources are low, and opportunities for transformational big-push livelihood advances in times of plenty.
The economic impacts of the novel Malaria vaccine
The economic impacts of the novel Malaria vaccine
Data-sharing agreement signed, partially funded
With Joseph Mfutso-Bengo and Jobiba ChinkhumbaData-sharing agreement signed, partially funded
Abstract: Malaria remains one of the most common causes of death for children under five, imposing severe health and productivity tolls on survivors. We combine data from a recent large-scale medical trial of the novel malaria vaccine in Malawi with the country's administrative and census data infrastructure. We assess the impacts of childhood malaria immunization on households' economic wellbeing in the short run. Further, we lay the groundwork for tracking the children in the treatment and control group of this trial through their childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.
Female Micro-Entrepreneurship and Child Development
Female Micro-Entrepreneurship and Child Development
Fully funded, data collection ongoing
With Andrew Foster and Hyun Soo SuhFully funded, data collection ongoing
Abstract: Ultra-Poor Graduation programs (UPGs) have achieved notable success in reducing extreme poverty lastingly among the targeted parent generation, yet an influence of UPGs on child development remains largely undocumented. We therefore study the impacts of the first – to our knowledge – explicitly child-focused UPG in Malawi. Targeting mothers with young children highlights an important tradeoff parental investment and time spent running a business. We document that women crowd in time from other activities and leisure to run their businesses while childcare time remains largely unchanged. The relaxed budget constraint allows for significant monetary investments in children. Already after one year, children show significant improvements in cognitive development, but we do not yet see any anthropometric gains.
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