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“You can’t stand on the beach of the sea of uncertainty with the waves lapping at your ankles.

You have to jump into the sea and stick your head underwater and blow some bubbles.”

- Andrew Gelman

This is the homepage of Rafe ("Rachael") Meager. I am an Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales. My research interests lie in the intersection of Bayesian statistics, econometrics and development economics.

I am nonbinary and use they/them pronouns. Before August 2025 papers had the name Rachael listed, and this should be preserved in citations etc, but after this date the appropriate first name for citation is Rafe.

My papers are below. If you have a question about the code or data for any published paper please email me at r dot meager at unsw.edu.au

An R package 'baggr' for Bayesian evidence aggregation, co-authored with Witold Wiecek, is here on CRAN, or here on github, and a super short easy explainer is here

My CV is here (but less frequently updated than this website).

My code and data are here. Any announcements are here.

You can usually find me on twitter or bsky. I also now have a blog/newsletter/thing where I write about art, emotions and death.

Publications and Accepted Pre-Registrations

Bayesian Impact Evaluation with Informative Priors: An Application to a Colombian Management and Export Improvement Program with David McKenzie and Leonardo Iacovone. Forthcoming at Econometrica as of May 2025 ( Our pre-registration report was previously accepted without commitment to publish at the Journal of Development Economics. Here is our Pre-Reg: https://www.socialscienceregistry.org/trials/3109 ) (Online Supplement with Appendices here)
"Toward a Taxonomy of Trust for Probabilistic Machine Learning" with Tamara Broderick , Andrew Gelman, Anna L. Smith , and Tian Zheng Science: Advances, Volume 9, Issue 7, February 2023, eabn3999(2023).DOI:10.1126/sciadv.abn3999
"Aggregating Distributional Treatment Effects: A Bayesian Hierarchical Analysis of the Microcredit Literature" The American Economic Review, June 2022 Appendices A-D Here , Full-text Older Version of Aggregating Distributional TEs (2020) Here , Older version Appendix|

"Understanding the Average Impact of Microcredit Expansions: A Bayesian Hierarchical Analysis of Seven Randomized Experiments" The American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2019. Dylan Matthews at Vox.com wrote a great summary of this paper here. (Voxdev piece I wrote explaining this article for a general audience can be found here) (Full-text older version here)
"Competing Lending Platforms, Endogenous Reputation, and Fragility in Microcredit Markets" with Peter Bardsley, The European Economic Review, 2019 (Full-text Older version here)
"Fast robustness quantification with variational Bayes" with Ryan Giordano, Tamara Broderick, Jonathan Huggins and Michael Jordan, 2016 ICML Workshop on #Data4Good: Machine Learning in Social Good Applications, New York, NY

Working Papers

"An Automatic Finite-Sample Robustness Metric: When Can Dropping A Little Data Change Conclusions?" with Ryan Giordano and Tamara Broderick (submitted) Our Zaminfluence R Package is here! Ryan updates it regularly. Email us if you have problems!
"Implementation Matters: Generalizing Treatment Effects in Education" with Noam Angrist (Note: we are updating this with some small but important corrections to my modelling simulations, please bear with us and if citing the simulation results please email me first.)
"Sensitivity of MCMC-based analyses to small-data removal" with Tin D Nguyen, Tamara Broderick and Ryan Giordano
Vitamin A Supplements and Child Mortality: Resolving a Controversy in Meta-analysis (with Witold Wiecek, paper completed but embargoed, draft available by email)

Selected Work In Progress

"A Multifaceted Approach to Poverty Alleviation in Six Countries: A Bayesian Hierarchical Analysis of the Graduation Program" with Andrew Gelman, Dean Karlan, Chris Udry and Witold Wiecek

"Data Transforms Are Models" with Edward Jee

Some Related Things I Have to Say

My slides on public speaking for academic economists (especially for grad students)

My advice on how to get into a top econ phd program if you did your undergrad in Australia (I wrote this just after I got into MIT. So far, it seems to hold up.)

I have been quoted once, to date, in the press, but it's quite a good one (from when I used she/her pronouns):