Pablo Balán

Welcome to my website! 

I am an Assistant Professor (Senior Lecturer) in the Department of Political Science at Tel Aviv University. I am also a Research Affiliate at the Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. I earned my PhD from the Department of Government at Harvard University in November 2021. 

I am a political economist studying developing countries, with a substantive focus on state capacity and social networks, a methodological focus on field experiments, and a regional focus on sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. I study how informal institutions affect the prospects and implementation of programmatic reform. A first stream of my research studies the foundations of state-building in low-capacity settings using field-experimental methods. A second set of projects examines the political effects of family networks in various contexts, from promoting electoral accountability to facilitating political activism within firms. Overall, following the steps of better-qualified people, my work revolves around "the family, private property, and the state."

My work has been published or is forthcoming in the American Political Science Review, the American Economic Review, the Journal of Politics, and World Development. Findings of my research have received coverage from ProMarket, VoxDev, EGAP, J-PAL, and the International Growth Centre. My public writing has appeared in The Monkey Cage. My dissertation received an honorable mention for the Ronald Coase Best Dissertation Award from the Society of Institutional and Organizational Economics (SIOE). I am also a recipient of the Alon Fellowship for Outstanding Faculty, awarded by the Israeli Council for Higher Education. At Harvard, I was affiliated with the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs (WFCIA), the Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS),  and Evidence for Policy Design (EPoD). During 2020-2021 I was a visiting scholar at the Penn Development Research Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania.

Before pursuing graduate studies at Harvard, I co-authored a general-audience book on political development in Argentina, my home country. The essay won a national book award and was declared of public interest by the Legislature of the City of Buenos Aires. Here is a short profile in La Nación, Argentina's leading newspaper.

News and Recent Publications:

My article Family Ties as Corporate Power is forthcoming at the Journal of Politics

Recent and Upcoming Trips:

• May 13-17: Washington DC (World Bank Land Conference)  [Presentation video]

• June 7-8: London (LSE-NYU Political Science and Political Economy Annual Conference)

• June 27-29: Chicago (SIOE: Society for Institutional and Organizational Economics)

• December 12-13: Boston (MIT Workshop on Solidarity in Times of Fracture)

• March 7-8: Washington DC (ASREC)

• June 25-29: Madrid (EPSA)

• September 10-14: Vancouver (APSA)

• October 17-20: Washington DC/Virginia (Markets & Society Conference at George Mason University)