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, Program Evaluation and Scaling, Behavioral Economics

Secondary Fields:

Family Economics, Labor and Education Economics, Macroeconomic Development

Research highlights

My research uses large-scale randomized evaluations to shape African development. My work transforms African schools into cost-effective hubs for agricultural technology diffusion, student-centered, experiential education, and routine experimental data collection—laying the foundation for equitable growth and structural transformation.

School-based agricultural extension (SBAE)

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 (2021–23), securing $4,160,984 across 12 grants since 2019. SBAE tackles technology diffusion and school attendance together by integrating experiential science instruction, school farms as demonstration plots, and student home-farming projects. Given its success, it will scale to all rural schools by 2035.

Job market paper: SBAE's effects reverse with parental engagement

SBAE diffuses technology to rural households through two channels: school farms that demonstrate improved techniques to parents, and student home projects that test those techniques on the household's own soils. My job market paper shows that parental engagement—an informational component I designed, centered on a video clarifying how SBAE differs from typical "school gardens" (often associated with drudgery and student farm labor)—is critical to activating both. With it, SBAE is more cost-effective than most African extension programs at diffusing technology and twice as cost-effective as a widely cited, successful conditional cash transfers program at raising attendance. Without it, SBAE fails to improve technology adoption and sharply reduces students' study hours and attendance—the opposite of its goal. More puzzling, parents persistently avoid information that would resolve their uncertainty: over three years, despite 81% student participation, only 44% of parents visited school farms, and absent parental engagement, parents at SBAE schools reduced both school farm visits and parent-teacher meeting attendance (by 39%) relative to control. On their own, standard models of decision-making under uncertainty—such as Bayesian updating, selective attention, memory retrieval, prospect theory, or model misspecification—are difficult to reconcile with the joint patterns of information avoidance and strong responses to parental engagement. By integrating existing economic theories using insights from cognitive neuroscience, my ongoing work develops a behavioral framework that explains these results.

Scaling SBAE:

"Learning to learn" teacher training, routine data collection, and equitable structural transformation

One of SBAE's core goals is to offer a platform of experiential learning experiences in science and agriculture in environments where learning resources—such as textbooks and laboratories—are missing. Yet, most teachers in developing countries lack such experiences themselves, and typically respond to pedagogical interventions by memorizing fixed recipes of "experiential learning" instead of internalizing the spirit and adapting to the dynamic needs of their curriculum and students. My ongoing work with Vesall Nourani (Harvard GSE) integrates the highly effective, student-centered "Learning to Learn" teacher training into SBAE, unlocking SBAE's potential in experiential science learning to improve student learning outcomes while enabling rural communities to experiment with new farming practices.

Supported by a routine student data collection system I developed and lab-in-the-field experiments, SBAE further provides an efficient platform to test economic theories and generate experimental evidence that informs agricultural R&D design. By equipping rural populations with generalizable skills beyond agriculture and appropriate agricultural technologies, SBAE positions African countries for equitable structural transformation.

Looking ahead, I am designing three clusters of randomized trials for 2026–2030 to strengthen SBAE as hubs for rural development in Liberia, Côte d'Ivoire, and Kenya.

Job Market Paper 1

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

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

Many African countries have vastly under-staffed agricultural extension systems, while rural households face stark tradeoffs between children's schooling and farm labor. This paper studies a school-based agricultural extension (SBAE) program in Liberia that integrates (i) experiential science instruction and student-centered extra-curricular activities; (ii) school farms as demonstration plots; and (iii) student home farming projects to tackle the dual challenges of diffusing agricultural technologies and motivating school attendance. I randomly assign SBAE across 197 junior high schools to estimate its intent-to-treat effects on voluntary participants. To tackle weak parent-school linkages, in a random subset of SBAE schools, I engage parents through a promotional video highlighting the complementarities between agriculture and education under SBAE, an annual farmer field day, or both. By the third year, SBAE successfully trains teachers and students but fails to improve technology adoption on any household parcels—and increases student absenteeism by 31%. Conversely, SBAE augmented with both types of engagement increases adopted techniques by 26% on parents' parcels and 53% on students' parcels. It also reduces student dropouts by 4-5 percentage points and absenteeism by 18%-28% over consecutive years, and increases the proportion of students saving for university by 6 percentage points. Parental engagement is pivotal because it activates muted mechanisms—(i) parents visit school farms, learn techniques, observe harvests, and increase (otherwise reduced) attendance at parent-teacher meetings; (ii) students manage household farms, use techniques, show parents improved yields, and increase (otherwise reduced) studying hours. Consistent with parents' confusion of SBAE with school gardens, the video clarifying SBAE's student-centered training changes parents' beliefs and plays a dominant role in diffusing technologies through mechanism (ii) and reducing dropouts. The augmented program is more cost-effective than most extension programs in Africa and over twice as cost-effective as conditional cash transfers in raising attendance. The findings underscore the promise of positioning schools as rural development hubs that break the cycle of stagnant agricultural productivity and low levels of human capital, and exemplify how strengthening parent-school linkages reveals school programs' hidden potential.

Job Market Paper 2

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

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

Developing countries face the dual challenges of diffusing agricultural technologies and motivating school attendance. In a randomized evaluation across 197 junior high schools in Liberia, Lee (2025) shows that schools can be developed into hubs that cost-effectively (i) diffuse technologies to rural households; (ii) improve students' livelihoods; and (iii) increase school attendance—but only when parents are engaged with program information. This paper studies a sub-treatment crucial for (ii) and (iii): exploiting the fact that engaged parents overwhelmingly express optimism about students' growth in farm management abilities, the intervention reveals this optimism to empower students to manage household farms. This signal about parents' openness to delegating farm management 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, 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. 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, third-party communication remains pivotal in intergenerational resource allocation. 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. Further, such informational nudges offer one way to simplify issues of participant targeting in agricultural extension and help address intertwined goals in rural development.

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