Christopher Udry

Christopher Udry is the Robert E. and Emily King Professor of Economics at Northwestern University. He is a development economist whose research focuses on rural economic activity in sub-Saharan Africa. He has conducted extensive field research in West Africa on technological change in agriculture, the use of financial markets, asset accumulation and gift exchange to cope with risk, gender relations and the structure of household economies, property rights, and a variety of other aspects of rural economic organization. He spent two years as a secondary school teacher in northern Ghana, and has been a visiting scholar at Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria and at the University of Ghana at Legon. At Yale University, Udry directed the Economic Growth Center and served as the Chair of the Department of Economics. He serves as a member of J-PAL's Board of Directors and Co-Scientific Director of J-PAL Africa.