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, Labor Economics, Agricultural Economics

Research highlights

My research agenda seeks to shape African development through large-scale randomized evaluations. My work transforms African schools into cost-effective hubs for agricultural technology diffusion, effective student-centered education, and routine experimental data collection that informs the selection of agricultural technologies—laying the foundation for equitable economic growth and structural transformation.

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 from 12 research grants since 2019. SBAE is more cost-effective than existing alternatives in tackling the dual challenges of tech diffusion and school attendance by integrating (i) experiential science instruction and extra-curricular activities; (ii) school farms as demonstration plots; and (iii) student home farming projects. With demonstrated success, it will scale to all rural schools by 2035.

As this year's Nobel economics award to Joel Mokyr reminds us, economic progress cannot be taken for granted, and it takes substantial effort to make people believe in it. My Job Market Papers exemplify how economists can uncover school programs that shift rural households' views on the tradeoffs between children's farm work and education—specifically by strengthening parent-school linkages. The high-profile, otherwise-muted success of SBAE was activated through light-touch interventions tackling parents' misperception about SBAE (JMP1) and barriers for parents to communicate their openness to changes in farm management to students (JMP2).

My ongoing work with Vesall Nourani (Harvard GSE) integrates the highly effective, student-centered "Learning to Learn" pedagogy into SBAE, unlocking its potential to improve student learning outcomes while enabling rural communities to experiment with new farming practices. Supported by a high-frequency student data collection system I developed and lab-in-the-field experiments, SBAE 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 forward, I am designing three clusters of randomized trials for 2026–2030 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 will address important puzzles in several fields, including:

behavioral economics (e.g. designing interventions that overcome 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. synergizing student-centered, experiential science learning and agricultural technology diffusion)
macroeconomic development (e.g. through SBAE: providing improved agricultural technologies while equipping students with generalizable skills beyond agriculture, thereby facilitating both rural development and structural changes towards high-value jobs/sectors)

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]

(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, 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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