Financial Development in Mozambique: Innovation and Challenges

Cátia Batista

Universidade Nova de Lisboa | NOVAFRICA | CReAM | IZA

Cátia Batista is an Assistant Professor at Nova University of Lisbon. She obtained her Ph.D. in Economics from the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago. She has an undergraduate degree in Economics from the Portuguese Catholic University. Catia’s main research interests are on international migration and capital flows, economic growth, income inequality, and education. She has lectured macroeconomics and international economics at the departments of Economics of the University of Chicago, University of Oxford, and Trinity College Dublin. In the past she has also worked at the International Monetary Fund and at the Portuguese Catholic University. She is currently affiliated as a researcher with CReAM (London, UK), IIIS (Dublin, Ireland), IZA (Bonn, Germany), and she is also a consultant for the IGC (International Growth Center, based at the LSE and at Oxford). Her work has been published in outlets such as the Journal of Development Economics and the World Bank Economic Review.

Dean Karlan

Yale University | Founder of Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) | NOVAFRICA

Dean Karlan is a Professor of Economics at Yale University. Karlan is President of Innovations for Poverty Action, a non-profit organization dedicated to discovering and promoting effective solutions to global poverty problems. Karlan is on the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors of the M.I.T. Jameel Poverty Action Lab. As a social entrepreneur, he is co-Founder of stickK.com, a website that uses lessons from behavioral economics to help people reach personal goals, such as weight loss and smoking cessation, through commitment contracts. In 2011, Karlan co-authored More Than Good Intentions: How a New Economics is Helping to Solve Global Poverty. Karlan received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, and was named an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow. His research focuses on microeconomic issues of financial decision-making, specifically employing experimental methodologies to examine what works, what does not, and why in interventions in microfinance, health, behavioral economics and charitable giving. In microfinance, he has studied credit impact, interest rate policy, savings product design, credit scoring policies, entrepreneurship training, and group versus individual liability. Karlan received a Ph.D. in Economics from M.I.T., an M.B.A. and an M.P.P. from the University of Chicago, and a B.A. in International Affairs from the University of Virginia. Blogs regularly on Freakonomics.

Sandra Sequeira

London School of Economics | STICERD | NOVAFRICA

Sandra Sequeira is an Assistant Professor in Development Economics at the Department of International Development at the London School of Economics. Her main research interests are in development economics and applied microeconomics. She is currently engaged in research projects related to state capacity, transport infrastructure and growth; consumer prosocial behavior; and the determinants of financial access, networking capital and technology adoption for private sector development. She holds a BA from Nova School of Business and Economics, an MA from the Fletcher School and a PhD from Harvard University.

Pedro Vicente

Universidade Nova de Lisboa | NOVAFRICA | BREAD | CSAE-Oxford

Pedro Vicente is an associate professor of economics at Nova School of Business and Economics, and an invited lecturer at the University of Oxford.

Pedro researches on development economics, with an emphasis on political economy issues, and a special interest in Africa. He designed and conducted field work (including randomized field experiments) in Mozambique, Nigeria, Cape Verde and Sao Tome and Principe. He has published articles in top field journals such as the Journal of Development Economics.

Pedro holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago, and is affiliated with BREAD (Duke University, USA) and with the CSAE (University of Oxford, UK). He is Lead Academic for Mozambique at the IGC (International Growth Center based at the LSE and Oxford), and a consultant for the World Bank.

Dean Yang

University of Michigan | BREAD | DEV | J-PAL | IPA | IZA | CReAM | NOVAFRICA

Dean Yang is an Associate Professor at the University of Michigan, where he holds appointments in the Department of Economics and the Ford School of Public Policy. His current research is primarily on financial services for the poor, international migration, and areas at the intersection of these topics. Other past and current topics of interest include health, disasters, international trade, and political economy. Methodologically, much of his work involves randomized controlled trials in field settings, but other work involves unearthing novel data sources and combining them with existing secondary datasets for analysis of development issues. He is currently running survey work and field experiments among Filipino migrant workers and their families, and among rural microloan clients in Malawi. His past and current field project locations include El Salvador, Guatemala, Indonesia, Malawi, Mozambique, the Philippines, as well as migrant populations of Filipinos in Italy, Indians in Qatar, and Salvadorans and Kenyans in the U.S. He teaches courses in development economics and microeconomics at the undergraduate, master, and Ph.D. levels. A native of the Philippines, he received his undergraduate and Ph.D. degrees in economics from Harvard University.