I am a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development (CGD) and Director of the Market Shaping Accelerator at the University of Chicago. I am also a lead researcher at UChicago’s Development Innovation Lab and a research affiliate at MIT GOV/LAB and the Busara Center for Behavioral Economics. Previously I was a fellow at Stanford University — jointly in the Golub Capital Social Impact Lab at the Graduate School of Business and the Center on Democracy Development and Rule of Law — and at the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse. I received my Ph.D. in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where I was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow. Before starting graduate school, I worked as a consultant for the Nigerian Government on development policy.

My research centers on topics in the political economy of development, drawing on theories and methods from political science, behavioral economics, and psychology. I focus on the micro-foundations of political behavior to gain leverage on macro policy-relevant questions. How can citizen-state relations be improved, government accountability strengthened, and citizen policy compliance encouraged? I combine field, lab-in-the-field, and online experiments with surveys and in-depth interviews to examine these questions in Africa and the US.

My current book project reexamines the role of elections in authoritarian endurance and explains why citizens vote in elections with foregone conclusions. Moving beyond conventional paradigms, my theory describes how a social norm of voting and accompanying social sanctions from peers contribute to high turnout. In other ongoing projects, I experimentally evaluate how to encourage citizen compliance with taxation and vaccination, optimal policies to combat the spread of online misinformation, and the use of Facebook advertisements for social science research in low- and middle-income countries.