News

This summer, SPP alumna Rumbidzai Masango (MPA ’15) and students Corina Ajder and Balint Nemeth (both MPA ’16) embarked on exciting opportunities to work on key policy issues in Nairobi, Kenya. “The policy space in Africa is constantly changing,” noted Masango. “This is both exciting and frustrating. I like working in Nairobi because Kenya is an influential country in East Africa and is also near Addis Ababa, the melting pot of policy engagement in Africa.”

Joining the SPP resident faculty this year, Assistant Professor Anand Murugesan is curious about how institutions, both formal and informal, influence economic behavior. “In the field of economics, we’ve been good at understanding how markets allocate resources and how incentives affect individual decision-making,” Murugesan explains. “But we are only beginning to explore how prior models with low explanatory power start to perform better when we account for institutions like law, power structures, and culture.”