(Last Updated October, 2024)
Tahir Andrabi is the Stedman-Sumner Professor of Economics at Pomona College.
His research takes a systems approach and emphasizes mapping the relevant actors in the education ecosystem, understanding their role and objectives, and identifying the exchange frictions these actors face in enabling system-wide educational quality improvements. These frictions can then be addressed through designing, evaluating, and refining educational interventions using theoretical insights and empirical research.
He has co-developed large scale comprehensive studies on educational outcomes in Pakistan, notably through the LEAPS (Learning and Educational Achievement in Pakistan Schools) initiative. This initiative has generated policy insights, such as highlighting large heterogeneity in school outcomes, the importance of report cards for enhancing school performance, and the educational impact of unconditional grants to schools.
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 targeted instruction pedagogical intervention in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and Islamabad Capital Territory.
The work has been funded over the last two decades by the World Bank, the National Science Foundation, the Economic and Social Research Council UK, The National Academy of Science, Pakistan Higher Education Commission, Douglas B. Marshall Jr. Family Foundation, and most recently by UK FCDO through RISE and WWHGE.
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.
He is a faculty affiliate at JPAL MIT, member of the Global Education Evidence Advisory Panel (GEEAP), and co-founder of the Center for Economic Research, Pakistan in Lahore, Pakistan. He has been a visiting scholar at MIT, a senior research associate at STICERD LSE, and a consultant for the World Bank. During 2017-20, he was the inaugural Dean of the School of Education at Lahore University of Management Sciences.
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 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.)
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.