Nesma Ali

I am currently working as an Economist at the World Bank Group, Enterprise Analysis Unit (DECEA, Washington DC. Previously I worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Düsseldorf Institute for Competition Economics (DICE), based at Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf in Germany. I hold a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Paris-Est. I received my Master degree in Development Economics from the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. 

My research interests include topics in empirical industrial organization and development economics, using detailed firm-and-product-level datasets from different developing countries. My current projects include work on the spillover effects from foreign investors, Hotel efficiency in Malaysia, and the effect of merger and acquisition on firms' prices, efficiency and market power in India.  It also includes work on firms' informality, political connections and competition in other countries. 

During my Ph.D., I have worked extensively on firms' performance in developing countries in face of the growing power of the informal sector. My empirical work on this topic includes the effect of informality on the productivity of micro and small enterprises in Egypt, as well as the effect of informal-firms competition on formal firms' productivity in Egypt and Sub-Saharan Africa. 

I have been to many conferences and workshops around the world to present my papers. My work has also been distinguished for research grants from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Economic Research Forum, and the German Research Foundation (DFG).