Hello, I’m Stephen O’Connell.
I am an Associate Professor of Economics at Emory University. I work in labor and development economics, studying how information frictions, institutional rules, and economic constraints shape who benefits from social programs, who advances in careers, and how people and firms recover from shocks.
Research
My projects focus on entrepreneurship, forced displacement, gender, and the design of social policy. I combine large-scale administrative data with field and policy experiments to study how the rules of programs and institutions determine their effects.
Recent work examines the targeting and effectiveness of humanitarian cash assistance to refugees, the political and economic returns to gender quotas and local political representation, and the influence of gender composition on group decision-making. A detailed research statement is available here, and a full list of papers is on the research page.
