Nava Ashraf is Professor of Economics in the Department of Economics at the London School of Economics. She moved to LSE in 2016 after ten years on the faculty at Harvard Business School, and was also the Inaugural Research Director at the Marshall Institute. She is the Founder and Director of the Altruistic Capital Lab in London.
Professor Ashraf’s research combines psychology and economics, using both lab and field experiments to test insights from behavioural economics in the context of global development in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. She also conducts research on questions of intra-household decision making and gender norms in the areas of finance, fertility, and labor force participation. Her papers are published in leading journals including the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics and the Journal of Economic Perspectives. Her field experiments on health services delivery and educational investment have been carried out jointly with the Ministries of Health and Education in Zambia, using a model of co-generation of knowledge, reaching national and global scale.
Professor Ashraf received her PhD in Economics from Harvard University, and her BA from Stanford University in International Relations and Economics.
Professor Nava Ashraf 