(Last Updated June, 2024)
Tahir Andrabi is the Stedman-Sumner Professor of Economics at Pomona College. He is a faculty affiliate at JPAL MIT, and has been a visiting scholar at MIT, a senior research associate at STICERD LSE, and a consultant for the World Bank. He is a member of the Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel (GEEAP) that has come out with two reports on “Smart buys” in education. He is a member of the Academic Leadership team of the What Works Hub for Global Education: an international partnership working out how to implement educational reforms at scale. He was a member of the tax and macroeconomic committees of the economic advisory board of the government of Pakistan in 1999-2000. He is a co-founder and Director, Social Policy and Public Goods Program of the Center for Economic Research, Pakistan in Lahore, Pakistan. He was the head of the Pakistan Country Research Team of Research in Systems of Education (RISE). From 2017-2020, he was the inaugural Dean of the Lahore University of Management Sciences School of Education in 2017-2020.
He has published extensively in major economics and education journals including the American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Development Economics, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Human Resources, and Comparative Education Review. In 2007, his work on religious education in Pakistan received the George Bereday Award for the best paper published in Comparative Education Review in 2006 from the Comparative and International Education Society.
His research on education (LEAPS–Learning and Educational Achievement in Punjab Schools) on quality of primary education in rural Punjab has been funded over the last decade and a half by the World Bank, the National Science Foundation, the Economic and Social Research Council UK and most recently by UK FCDO through RISE and WWHGE.
He was also the PI on a National Academy of Sciences/Higher Education Commission, Pakistan grant on evaluating the recovery from the 2005 northern Pakistan earthquake.
He co-founded the website risepak.com to help coordinate relief in the aftermath of the October 2005 earthquake. The website was awarded the Stockholm Challenge Award (2006) for the best ICT project in the public administration category.
His research has been covered by The Financial Times, Toronto Globe and Mail, USA Today, The Christian Science Monitor, Newsweek, The Economist, Foreign Policy and news media around the world. (See The Economist magazine cover story, the American Economic Association research highlights for media coverage of education research and the Associated Press/Fox, Newsweek, BostonGlobe, Dailytimes, USA Today, The Guardian, the Globe and Mail and The Dawn for news coverage of the research on the earthquake.)
He is currently working on analysis of the 6th round of the LEAPS longitudinal survey evaluating the post COVID educational landscape in Pakistan and a large-scale pilot on the role of technology in a large scale targeted instruction pedagogical intervention the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and Islamabad Capital Territory.
Professor Andrabi is a graduate of Swarthmore College and holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He teaches classes in economic development, game theory, applied econometrics, and empirical microeconomics.