Duncan Webb

I am a development economist who uses tools and insights from behavioural economics. My current projects focus on discrimination, social change, and human capital.

I'm a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University, and will join NovaSBE as an Assistant Professor in 2025.

I completed my PhD at the Paris School of Economics, spent 2022-23 as a visiting scholar at MIT, and 2021 at UC Berkeley.

Research

Working papers

Silence to Solidarity: How Communication About a Minority Affects Discrimination

R&R, Journal of Political Economy

Winner of Weiss NEUDC Distinguished Paper 2023
[VoxDev] [VoxTalks Economics] [Ideas of India Podcast] [World Bank] [Ideas for India]

Menstrual Stigma, Hygiene, and Human Capital: Experimental Evidence from Madagascar with Karen Macours and Julieta Vera Rueda
[JPAL Summary] [FID] [VoxDev]

Psychological Mechanisms for Eliciting Preferences and Beliefs
with Evan Friedman and Suanna Oh

Publications

Critical Periods in Cognitive and Socioemotional Development: Evidence from Weather Shocks in Indonesia [Ungated]
The Economic Journal, 2024

COVID-19 spread, detection, and dynamics in Bogota, Colombia 

Nature Communications, 2021

with Rachid Laajaj et al.
Coverage: [Blu] [Caracol] [Caracol 2] [Nuevo Siglo]

Understanding how socioeconomic inequalities drive inequalities in COVID-19 infections
Scientific Reports, 2022

with Rachid Laajaj et al.
Coverage: [Espectador] [Blu]
Presented at: Health Secretary of Colombia, Mayor's Office of Bogota

Code and other resources

dups - an R package for dealing with duplicates

trackr - an R package that helps you easily track the results of dplyr functions

qval - an R package that helps with multiple hypothesis testing by calculating FDR-adjusted p-values in the style of Anderson (2008) 

ZenBot - a simple web app that generates customised guided meditations of any length

Longtermism - a framework outlining the tradeoff faced when trying to affect the long-run future

History of gay rights - a blog post outlining how the world became more accepting of homosexuality