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]
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