Tavneet Suri

Tavneet Suri is the Maurice F. Strong Career Development Professor and an Associate Professor of Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Suri is a development economist, with a regional focus on sub-Saharan Africa. Her research centers on a variety of applied economics issues in sub-Saharan Africa. She uses microeconomic and econometric models to examine the efficiency of household behavior and to understand subsequent policy implications. In the field, she often spends time collecting her own survey data. Her research includes analyzing the costs and benefits that households face when deciding whether to use rural seed technologies in Kenya, the extent of risk-pooling insurance mechanisms in rural Kenya, and the trade-offs between child labor and schooling in Ghana. Her ongoing projects investigate the adoption of water technologies in rural Kenya and the role of credit contracts in these decisions.

She is a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research; an affiliate of BREAD, J-PAL, and CEPR; and co-director of the Agriculture Research Program at the International Growth Center.

Suri holds a BA in economics from Trinity College, Cambridge University, as well as an MA in international and development economics, an MPhil in economics, and a PhD from Yale University.