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 this interview, we got the opportunity to talk to Prof. Abdoulaye Ndiaye.
Abdoulaye Ndiaye is an Assistant Professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University. His research examines questions in macroeconomics, public finance, and development economics, with a particular interest in the role of government, taxation, and social protection.
ETRM: Your research agenda ranges from theory of optimal taxation, retirement and blockchain design to very applied questions about tax capacity and debt. What about these questions resonates with you?
Abdoulaye: This collection of topics mentioned come from the same source and motivation: I have always been interested in what happens in low- and middle-income countries around the world. My interest in public finance came from realizing how important the state is in these countries. My interest in blockchain, for example, developed after visiting Nigeria, where I saw people using stablecoins in very small villages. Given the limitations of banking systems and transaction limits in many African countries, I started wondering what alternatives were available to people. That experience led to some of my research ideas.
More broadly, I see macroeconomics as complementary to the work that people in the nonprofit sector do to promote development through interventions in areas such as public health. Some development challenges operate at a much larger scale and over a much longer time horizon than the typical intervention. Politicians often want to know how to achieve a specific result within three years, but questions such as public finance reform are difficult to study through randomized experiments. This is one reason I became interested in a macroeconomic approach to development.
ETRM: You served as Senior Advisor to Senegal’s Minister of the Economy. What did working inside the government teach you that models didn’t, and how has it changed the way you approach research?
Abdoulaye: I was there primarily as an observer, to learn and inform my research. The experience helped me understand the constraints policymakers face. In research, we often look for first-best or second-best solutions, but in practice, policymakers may have to settle for the fourth-best or fifth-best options because of political and institutional constraints. Understanding those constraints and the political equilibrium is essential to understanding what is actually feasible.
I also learned how difficult it can be to conduct even basic empirical research in many countries. Research often starts with observational studies, using the kinds of regressions we learn in the first or second year of graduate school. Yet even these standard methods can be difficult to implement when countries lack linked administrative data connecting employers and employees, wages, education, and other characteristics. Statistical agencies may have the necessary processes on paper but not put them into practice. This experience made me think more about these bottlenecks and how micro-development research can be scaled.
As economists, we need to think about how to make research more useful to policymakers. One approach is to pilot programs, learn from the results, and then scale up. This creates an intermediate step between research and large-scale implementation. Finally, the experience deepened my interest in understanding why institutions are weak in the first place. Building tax systems and strengthening state and fiscal capacity require looking at the historical origins of institutions. This perspective has informed my work on Nigeria, particularly on the colonial and precolonial origins of fiscal capacity.
ETRM: You mentioned that data can be scarce or unreliable in some settings. What advice do you have for researchers working in these contexts, particularly when it comes to meeting the profession’s standards?
Abdoulaye: Researchers need to be creative and look for new connections. Three years ago, I started working in the archives in Nigeria, just as I was beginning to see the potential of AI. The tools for analyzing data have become much more diverse and powerful, opening up possibilities in archives, interviews, social media, surveys, and information treatments.
My advice is not to get discouraged. There are many sources of data in developing countries, including nightlight data and other sources that researchers may not have considered. The goal should be to pursue an ambitious, important question that you genuinely care about and then find the evidence to address it. I think this is particularly important now because what I call the “execution advantage” of knowing how to implement a beautiful regression discontinuity design or instrumental variables strategy is disappearing. AI is very good at these things. What matters increasingly is asking the right questions. If you can find credible, well-identified evidence, excellent. If the evidence is limited, other approaches, including structural models, can help you make progress. Structural models are particularly useful when you combine them with institutional knowledge, economic intuition, and policy experience. You need to understand the setting well enough to build a model that captures its essential features. In my own work on taxation in developing countries, for example, we are building a framework for understanding tax collection. If identification is difficult, a well-specified model can still help you interpret the data and assess whether the model’s implications make sense for the setting.
Ultimately, I think the distinction between micro and macro should disappear. Rather than limiting ourselves to familiar methods or the data immediately available to us, we should focus on important questions and look beyond the usual sources of evidence.
ETRM: You wrote What Economists Do, a practical guide for aspiring economists. What do young economists most often misunderstand about building a successful career, and what are the highest-return steps they can take early on?
Abdoulaye: I wanted to write that piece for a long time as a public good. I get a lot of emails from people with very different goals. Some want to become researchers, others want to work in policy, and some want to do a PhD but haven't necessarily thought through what they want to do afterward. In the piece, I lay out four types of economists, depending on whether you work in a research or policy institution and whether your work focuses on research or policy. I really encourage people to read it before deciding to do a PhD, because there are so many different things you can do as an economist. And that's not even counting business economics, which is becoming increasingly important as computing resources become more of a bottleneck.
My advice to people starting or finishing a PhD is to stay open-minded about what the future of economics will look like. I think economists will increasingly become what I call R&D economists, or research and development economists. The job isn't just to write a paper, put it on a shelf, and hope that someone picks it up five years later. It's also about thinking through how your research can actually influence the world and inform policy. For example, when you estimate a treatment effect, I encourage students to go a step further. Ask yourself: What are the implications for policy? What would the counterfactual look like? What could we actually do with these findings? Thinking through those questions is part of the research process, too.
I also think we need to focus on relevance, not just on what's trendy right now. What are the big challenges that economics hasn't really answered yet? What problems might we face in the future, and what can we do about them? That's the kind of research we should be thinking about. In my own case, Senegal's debt crisis gave me an opportunity to think about how what I've learned in public finance could be applied to a real policy challenge.
So, my advice to graduate students is to really think about relevance. Execution is becoming easier, but asking the right questions remains difficult. Finding new data, identifying important problems, and figuring out how research can help address them, that's where I think economists can make a real difference.
ETRM: This year, you were named NextGen Best African Economist Under 40 and included on The Africa Report’s list of 26 Africans making waves. As you mentioned you have also been at the forefront of the debate on Senegal’s debt crisis. What does the pipeline of African economists look like, and what is still missing for them to shape both the global research agenda and economic policy on the continent?
Abdoulaye: I think the pipeline is growing. There are many African economists working in international organizations like the IMF and the World Bank. But what I often say is that the role of an academic economist is to analyze issues clearly and independently, without strings attached. That's something academia offers.
We live in a world shaped by geopolitical and geoeconomic realities. People also come to economics for different reasons. Many Argentinians, for example, go into macroeconomics because they've experienced inflation in their own country. Similarly, many Africans get into economics because they want to see the continent develop and grow. And there's room for both: advancing knowledge for its own sake and doing research that has an impact.
I think academia offers a space to ask these questions independently and think about how research can make a difference. There are also initiatives that can help support young economists, such as mentorship programs like GAIN and EconNect Africa. We also need to strengthen the pipeline within African universities, so they can offer training at the level of leading universities in the US and elsewhere. That would allow more people to pursue PhDs without having to leave the continent. More broadly, there's a resurgence of economic debate, but sometimes that debate is dominated by people coming from a more ideological perspective. I think the role of economists is to make the expert voice heard above the noise.
I'm hopeful that African economists will shape the research agenda as they become a large enough community to set their own priorities. They already have a lot of institutional knowledge, strong economic intuition, and so many questions that matter for the continent. That puts them in a good position to formulate the right hypotheses and address those questions. Ultimately, success isn't about having just one African economist in a prominent position somewhere. It's about having more researchers from Africa, in leading universities in Africa and around the world, shaping research and policy on the continent. That's what I think success looks like.
