ETRM Interview Series – Christopher R. Udry
As part of our interview series, we ask renowned experts in the field about the future of research in development economics, and for their advice for young researchers. For our third interview, we got the opportunity to talk to Prof. Chris Udry.
Christopher R. Udry is a development economist whose research focuses on rural economic activity in Sub-Saharan Africa. His current research examines technological change, risk, and financial markets, gender and households, property rights, psychological well-being and economic decision-making, and a variety of other aspects of rural economic organization. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Board Member of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development, and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
ETRM: How would you define development economics on the frontier currently?
Chris Udry: Development Economics isn’t really a field. It is more of a set of topics. So I would define economists on the frontier as anybody who’s working on questions that are relevant to developing countries and who is teaching us new things about their economic organization, or appropriate policy.
ETRM: Which do you think are the main areas that still need more research and that are also of interest to policymakers?
Chris Udry: That’s a good question. I think development as a field is still so small relative to the questions that matter, that there’s almost no place where I think there’s not more research needed in development economics. The questions are so difficult, and so heterogeneous across the developing world, that almost every topic still needs more research. But there are certain things where it’s clear we haven’t had enough. Firstly, Things like how the firm side of development works is just big. Most people want jobs. They don’t want to be running little businesses or being self-employed farmers. They want work. And then the study of political economy has been growing rapidly, but still, I think is much weaker than it should be. I guess it was probably the first. The third would be the interaction between micro and macroeconomics is trying to understand how equilibrium effects feed back into the micro things that we’ve been focusing on.
ETRM: We would love to hear about your idea generation process. Where do you get your research ideas from and what advice would you give graduate students about this?
Chris Udry: I think there are hugely diverse sources of research ideas, and different people do it in very different ways. And I do it very different ways, at different times. Some are sort of conventional. The idea I got about looking at intra-household resource allocation in Burkina Faso came from looking at data and noticing that the data set indicated who in the family managed which plot, so that came out of just playing around with data and looking at it. But the ideas that I like the best, and the most satisfying are coming from discussions with people in the community that I research on. Doing field research myself and talking with people in villages in northern Nigeria for example, they gave me my dissertation by telling me what they were doing. This new idea that I thought of came out of conversations with people. So that’s the most fun way to come up with research.
ETRM: That is a great answer to lead to our next question. Given your extensive experience with fieldwork, how would you advise graduate students interested in primary data collection to manage their time with respect to planning their own experiments, while continuing with grad school requirements, grant writing, etc.?
Chris Udry: Field experiments take time, especially if you do experiments in agriculture. Field data collection takes time, especially if it’s large scale. I think for me spending a year in the field collecting data was extremely helpful. Having unstructured time, to have conversations with people is an extremely creative use of time. Not everybody should do it. But for those who can afford the opportunity cost of another six months or a year, I think that can be a very valuable use of time. Spending time in the field talking with people in an unstructured way. But not everybody should do that. Because as economists our comparative advantage isn’t always collecting our data, or spending time talking with people. Sometimes our comparative advantage is downloading a dataset, looking at or thinking of a new theory. So, I think it depends on what you want out of your academic career and how you’re thinking about what will make you satisfied as a scholar. If for personal reasons, you have a desire to do field work, because it’s something that should be exciting to you, I think that’s right. When is fieldwork useful? I think it is when you don’t have a good understanding and can’t get a good understanding from the literature about institutions to write a coherent question. That’s when it’s really important for you to be in the field. Learn enough to ask the questions right. It’s when you can’t form the questions properly in advance that being in the field makes sense. So if that’s something you want to do, I would think of a topic that you’re interested in about which the literature is scarce so that the time you spend talking to people can be useful in uncovering what the institutions are.
ETRM: That makes sense. Because I know that development economists, especially graduate students, we want to have some field experience for sure, but Ph.D. time is so short.
Chris Udry: Well, it took me eight years, and that was when everyone else was finishing in four or five years.
ETRM: Thank you so much for your valuable time!
