Jimmy Lee

Welcome! I am a Postdoctoral Fellow in Economics at the Global Poverty Research Lab, Northwestern University. I am currently visiting the Harvard Center for International Development. I received my PhD in economics in 2024 from Northwestern University under the supervision of Christopher Udry (Chair), Dean Karlan, and Lori Beaman. I will be on the economics and public policy job markets in 2025/26. You can contact me at jimmylee@u.northwestern.edu. Here are the links to my CV and résumé.

Primary Fields:

Development Economics, Family Economics, Program Evaluation and Scaling

Secondary Fields:

Organizational Economics, Behavioral Economics, Macroeconomic Development, Economics of Education, Agricultural Economics

Research highlights

My research agenda seeks to shape African development through large-scale randomized evaluations, while leveraging policy successes to create scope for experiments that can refine conventional theories.

In collaboration with the NGOs AgriCorps and 4-H Liberia, I piloted and then led a large-scale randomized evaluation of school-based agricultural extension (SBAE) in Liberia in 2021-23—securing a total of $4,160,984 in research and scaling grants to date. SBAE cost-effectively tackles the dual challenges of agricultural technology diffusion and rural school attendance by integrating experiential science instruction, extra-curricular activities, school demonstration farms, and student home projects. With proven success, it is expected to scale to all rural schools by 2035.

My Job Market Papers exemplify how economists can uncover programs with hidden potentials through multi-layered experiments. The high-profile, otherwise-muted success of SBAE was activated through light-touch interventions tackling weak parent-school linkages (JMP1) and barriers for parents to communicate their openness to changes in farm management to students (JMP2).

Transforming schools into integrated hubs for rural development creates scope for experiments that refine conventional theories. Supported by a National Science Foundation grant, JMP2 challenges the view that frequent interactions within households make communication frictions inconsequential. It shows that: (i) students fail to learn about parents’ openness—even as parents become more open to changes after watching promotional videos and students can infer parents' openness from school visits and technology adoption; (ii) parents' beliefs, elicited in surveys, can function as effective signals, enabling students to benefit from SBAE—switching them to sales-oriented farming with timely earnings, raising annual income by 63%, timely payment of school fees by 43-47%, and doubling impact per dollar on school attendance—a key reason SBAE outperforms conditional cash transfers in cost-effectiveness. More generally, recognizing household members often overlook opportunities for joint decision-making under new technologies, my model provides tested insights on how technology selection, participant targeting, and informational nudges should be cohesively designed to broaden benefits from agricultural extension and tackle intertwined goals in rural development.

Anticipating SBAE's integration with mobile tools that deliver customized farming advice, I have also piloted a Weiss-funded empirical framework to estimate how algorithmic technology affects farmers facing heterogeneous local conditions—such as soils, market distances, and climate risks—advancing the study of directed technical change in contexts where the relevant production factors are high-dimensional, markets are missing, and R&D decisions are guided by data availability.

Looking forward, I am designing three clusters of randomized trials for 2026–2028 to test various ways to strengthen SBAE's capacity to function as hubs for rural development—in Liberia, Côte d'Ivoire, and Kenya. These trials—aided by high-frequency data collection from students and lab-in-the-field experiments—will address important puzzles in several fields, including:

behavioral economics (e.g. designing interventions that overcome/utilize people's avoidance of shame and blame in agricultural technology diffusion)
information and organizational economics (e.g. how social norms might shape higher-order beliefs about farm management abilities and affect bargaining over resource control in families and farming groups)
economics of education (e.g. exploiting synergies between student-centered, experiential science learning and agricultural technology diffusion)
macroeconomic development (e.g. designing school curricula to facilitate both rural development and structural changes towards high-value jobs/sectors)

Job Market Paper 1 (policy contribution to flagship program)

Activating School-based Agricultural Extension with Parental Engagement: Experimental Evidence from Liberia (draft available soon)

[Funded by Fund for Innovation in Development, USAID-DIV, Wellspring Foundation, and FAO]

(Follow-up survey in late 2026: on parents' crop yields and spillovers of farming practices to non-parent farmers)

Many African countries have vastly under-staffed agricultural extension systems. Most rural students assist on household farms. Can schools be developed into cost-effective hubs that disseminate improved technologies while motivating school attendance? This paper studies a school-based agricultural extension (SBAE) program in Liberia that integrates experiential science instruction, extra-curricular activities, school demonstration farms, and student home projects to amplify technology diffusion. I randomly assign SBAE across 197 junior high schools to estimate its intent-to-treat effects on voluntary participants. Tackling weak parent-school linkages, in a random subset of SBAE schools, parents are engaged through a promotional video, an annual farmer field day, or both. By the third year, the program alone successfully trains teachers and students but fails to improve technology adoption on any household parcels—even increasing student absenteeism. Conversely, SBAE augmented with both types of engagement increases adopted techniques by 26%-53% across parent- and student-managed parcels, students' annual savings by 92%, and school attendance by 3.5 weeks—through reduced dropouts and absenteeism over consecutive years. Both boys and girls, across grades, benefit. Parental engagement is pivotal because it activates intra-household mechanisms otherwise completely muted—(i) parents visit school farms, learn techniques and observe harvests, and attend parent-teacher meetings; (ii) students manage household farms, use promoted techniques, and show to parents improved yields. The augmented program is more cost-effective than most rigorously evaluated extension programs in Africa and twice as cost-effective as conditional cash transfers in raising attendance. The findings underscore the promise of positioning schools as hubs for rural development and exemplify how the hidden potentials of school programs can be revealed by joint evaluations with household interventions.

Job Market Paper 2 (contribution to the literatures of family economics, economic empowerment, design of agricultural extension, and informational nudges)

Parents’ Beliefs as a Nudge: Empowering Students to Benefit from School-based Agricultural Extension in Liberia (draft available soon)

[Funded by NSF, Weiss Fund, Global Poverty Research Lab, and the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs]

(Follow-up survey in late 2026: on parents' crop yields and indicators of household harmony)

Developing countries face logistical challenges in promoting new practices to improve rural living standards. Schools can function as cost-effective hubs to disseminate practices while motivating school attendance. In a randomized evaluation across 197 junior high schools, Lee (2025) shows that engaging parents with program information is crucial for technology diffusion under school-based agricultural extension (SBAE) in Liberia. This paper studies a sub-treatment that inspires students to manage household farms by revealing parents' optimism about SBAE's efficacy in training students. This signal about parents' openness to delegating farm management—elicited in surveys—is a highly effective nudge. Two years later, SBAE improves students' livelihoods and education only with this nudge: annual income rises by 63%, timely payment of school fees rises by 43-47%, and impact per dollar on attendance doubles. Consistent with students' aspirations and SBAE's emphasis on "learning by earning", students request and shift time from subsistence parcels to managing sales-oriented parcels, and adopt practices enabling timely income from school-tested crops. Both boys and girls, across grades, benefit—often through different channels. While the nudge effects partly reflect encouragement external to households, farm interactions unique to the targeted parent-student dyad pinpoint a key mechanism in intra-household dynamics. Even when parents are engaged and students could infer parents' types from school visits and technology adoption, frictions in communicating subjective information remain central to resource allocation. Further, paired with effective programs, signaling influential household members’ openness to changes in resource control offers a low-cost, non-intrusive way to empower diverse individuals through self-selection. I offer a substantive theory of communication frictions and test implications for agricultural extension—since household members often overlook opportunities for joint decision-making under new technologies, technology selection, participant targeting, and informational nudges should be cohesively designed to broaden benefits and address intertwined goals in rural development.

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