Duncan Webb

I'm a PhD student at the Paris School of Economics and a Global Priorities Fellow supported by the Forethought Foundation. I am a development economist who uses tools and ideas from behavioural economics. My current projects focus on discrimination, norms, and stigma.

I am on the job market this year (2023/24).

I spent 2022-23 as a visiting scholar at MIT, and 2021 at UC Berkeley. 

📮 duncan.webb@psemail.eu

📚 CV

🐦 @dunc_webb

Research

Job market paper

Critical Periods in Cognitive and Socioemotional Development: Evidence from Weather Shocks in Indonesia
(Conditionally Accepted, Economic Journal)

Work in progress

Transforming Harmful Social Norms: The Effect of Reducing Menstrual Stigma on Health Behaviours and Girls’ Education
with Karen Macours and Julieta Vera

A Recall Method for Incentivising Choices and Beliefs
with Evan Friedman and Suanna Oh


Policy projects

COVID-19 spread, detection, and dynamics in Bogota, Colombia 

Nature Communications, 2021

with Rachid Laajaj et al.
Coverage: [Blu] [Caracol] [Caracol 2] [Nuevo Siglo]

Understanding how socioeconomic inequalities drive inequalities in COVID-19 infections
Scientific Reports, 2022

with Rachid Laajaj et al.
Coverage: [Espectador] [Blu]
Presented at: Health Secretary of Colombia, Mayor's Office of Bogota

Code

dups - an R package for dealing with duplicates

trackr - an R package that helps you easily track the results of dplyr functions

qval - an R package that helps with multiple hypothesis testing by calculating FDR-adjusted p-values in the style of Anderson (2008) 

Bits and Bobs

Effective Altruism - I've written a framework outlining the tradeoff faced when trying to affect the long-run future here.