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Department of Economics

Julian is a behavioral and welfare economist with a focus on global priorities and policy evaluation. He spent nine years in the public sector, within the US government and then the World Bank, before returning to academia to join the University of Exeter in 2018. In addition to having previously served as an assistant professor at Northwestern University (Kellogg School of Management), Julian has spent time as a fellow and/or visiting faculty member at UC Berkeley (Public Health); UC San Francisco (Medical School); University of Southern California (Psychology); Caltech (Social Science); HEC Paris (Finance); Yale (Economics); and Harvard (Kennedy School of Government). 

 

Julian’s work has been published in academic journals spanning a wide range of disciplines, and it has been mentioned in media outlets such as The New York Times, Foreign Affairs, The Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, Forbes, Foreign Policy, The Washington Post, Bloomberg, and The Economist. He has consulted for the US National Institute of Mental Health, NASA, the US Army, Bates White, Lockheed-Martin, BCG, and GiveWell. Julian has traveled to roughly 95 countries, and he once received a special award in physics at the 1987 science fair in Washington, DC.


Interests:

Julian’s research focuses on the interaction between individual preferences, decisions, and well-being on the one hand, and institutional policies on the other, with a special interest in explicit welfare tradeoffs. He uses a wide range of methodological approaches, ranging from mathematical theory to lab & field experiments to formal rhetoric to surveys to large administrative data. Much of his work has taken place in more than a dozen developing countries (especially in sub-Saharan Africa), with a particular sectoral focus on health and financial behavior, but he is easily tempted in new directions.

Fields:

  • Behavioral Public Policy
  • Development Economics
  • Experiment and Survey Methodology
  • Microeconomic Theory
  • Health & Financial Decision-making
  • Welfare Economics
  • Political Philosophy


Qualifications:

PhD in Economics, MIT (1998)

BS and MS in Mathematics, Caltech (1994)

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