“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
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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. Now recommended by the good people at the NBER!
An R Package 'Zaminfluence' for data dropping sensitivity for Z estimators (or, Z-AMIP-robustness computation) that was entirely written by Ryan Giordano is here! Implement it for your own papers today!
My code and data are here. Any announcements are here.
You can usually find me on bsky. (I maintain twitter mostly as a legacy account.) I also now have a blog/newsletter/thing where I write about art, emotions and death.
Publications and Accepted Work
An automatic finite-sample robustness metric: when can dropping a little data change conclusions? Part I: definitions and experiments with Ryan Giordano and Tamara Broderick, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A (2026) 384 (2321): 20250001 .
An automatic finite-sample robustness metric: when can dropping a little data change conclusions? Part II: theory and intuition with Ryan Giordano and Tamara Broderick, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A (2026) 384 (2321): 20240614 .
(Eagle-eyed economists may note, these were 1 paper: "An Automatic Finite-Sample Robustness Metric: When Can Dropping A Little Data Change Conclusions?" . It got split into 2 because econ papers are more than double the length of stats papers and working on interdisciplinary projects is (1) vital for the future of applied scholarship (2) very exciting (3) hell.)
Bayesian Impact Evaluation with Informative Priors: An Application to a Colombian Management and Export Improvement Program with David McKenzie and Leonardo Iacovone. Econometrica, September 2025, Vol 93, Issue 5 ( 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) (David wrote a nice general audience blog post about this here!)
Review of Kardas-Nelson, Mara. We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky: The Seductive Promise of Microfinance. Journal of Economic Literature 63 (4): 1558–60, 2025 ungated 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. (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
"Implementation Matters: Generalizing Treatment Effects in Education" with Noam Angrist (submitted) short slides
"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
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
"Model Uncertainty Between Averaging and Selection: Non-nested model sets can form a continuum in practice"
"The identification and misspecification tradeoff in evidence aggregation and beyond"
Some Related Things I Have to Say (includes alleged public goods)
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.)
Selected Media and Press Mentions
VoxDev Podcast Interview from June 2026
Voxdev piece on the Implementation working paper with Noam Angrist 2024
MP Dr Andrew Leigh mentioned this implementation paper in his 2023 Address to Evidence and Implementation Summit, Melbourne
Voxdev piece on the 2019 microcredit paper here
Alice Evans Podcast from 2017 (which was also featured on IPA's Great Holiday Travel Podcast Playlist ) -- this is lost somehow! if anyone has the link let me know...
I was quoted by the WSJ (June 2026) "Hundred of Billions in Loans didn't make a dent in global poverty"
I was quoted by the News Guild of New York (August 2022) "Racial Disparities in Performance Evaluations at The New York Times", which is my proudest press moment to date (even though it uses my old name and pronouns):
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