Stephen D. O’Connell is a labor and development economist and Associate Professor of Economics at Emory University. He holds a B.A. in Economics from Boston College and an M.Phil. and Ph.D. in Economics from the Graduate Center, CUNY. He was a Postdoctoral Fellow at MIT, and joined Emory in 2018. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 2022. In early 2025, he served as Visiting Senior Research Associate at the Becker-Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago. He is affiliated with the JPAL/IPA Displaced Livelihoods Initiative (since 2023), the Households in Conflict Network (since 2020), and IZA Institute of Labor Economics (since 2015).
His research examines how social protection programs and political institutions shape economic outcomes, with a focus on entrepreneurship, forced displacement, gender, and social policy design. He combines randomized controlled trials, quasi-experimental methods, and qualitative fieldwork to study at-scale government programs and policy changes in low-income countries.
Policy engagement
Dr. O’Connell has over 15 years of experience in development policy design and analysis, and has consulted for or collaborated with the World Bank, UNHCR, WFP, IOM, national governments and ministries, and local and international NGOs across India, Brazil, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, and Egypt.
He co-led a six-year engagement with UNHCR Lebanon (2018–2024) in the assessment, design, analysis, and implementation of the cash transfer targeting system for Syrian refugees. The econometric targeting model he and his coauthors developed has been put directly into practice to allocate over $1 billion in humanitarian aid. He led a similar engagement with UNHCR Iraq (2023–24), and is currently involved in multiple projects with IOM Iraq analyzing the effects of livelihoods programming on social cohesion.
As Principal Investigator for a study of Brazil’s national skills training program (PRONATEC), he presented results to the Special Secretariat for Strategic Affairs of the Brazilian Presidency and the Ministry of Industry. This work was also presented in a hearing of the Brazilian Federal Senate and informed subsequent policy discussions on technical and vocational training reform at the federal level.
He served as Lead Specialist and Principal Investigator at the World Bank (2016–2018) and as a consultant (2010–2016) on private-sector development and poverty research, and has reviewed more than $14 million in grants across more than 30 proposals for the World Bank, NSF, DFID-IZA, 3ie, the William T. Grant Foundation, and other organizations.
Research in policy and practice
His research on gender quotas and political career progression is cited in J-PAL’s policy insight on improving women’s representation through gender quotas. His work on cash transfers to refugees is cited in the VoxDev literature review on policies supporting refugees and host communities, and in the World Bank–UNHCR Joint Data Center’s evidence review on cash transfers. His research is used in graduate courses in development economics at Harvard, MIT, UC Berkeley, University of Chicago, University of Connecticut, University of Maryland, Université Toulouse, and Ecole Polytechnique.
Teaching and mentoring
He teaches undergraduate, masters, and doctoral courses in econometrics, labor economics, and development economics. He directs Emory Economics’ undergraduate research and Honors Programs and mentors Ph.D. and undergraduate students. He has received grants from NSF, JPAL/IPA, the Russell Sage Foundation, and the World Bank. He speaks English, Spanish (C1), and Arabic (A2). His research methods and subject-matter expertise are applicable to labor market analysis, economic damages assessment, and the statistical analysis of employment discrimination.