Nava Ashraf

Psychology and Economics Programme Co-Director, Professor of Economics and Research Director, Marshall Institute of Philanthropy and Entrepreneurship

Expertise: development, gender economics

Telephone:

+44 (0)20 7955 6992

Email:

n.ashraf1@lse.ac.uk

Connect:

Twitter
Website

Links:

Economics of Environment and Energy
Development
Psychology and Economics
Altruistic Capital Lab
Cohesive Capitalism
Department of Economics

Biography

Nava Ashraf's current research interests are:

Psychology and Economics
Development Economics
Economics of the Family

Latest

Upcoming: STICERD Public Events and Lectures

Visions of the Future: Reimagining the way we work

19 June 2025

Oriana Bandiera (LSE), Daniel Susskind (University of Oxford), Nava Ashraf (LSE)

This event is part of the LSE Festival: Visions for the Future, running from Monday 16 to Saturday 21 June 2025, with a series of events exploring the threats and opportunities of the near and distant future, and what a ... Read more...

Upcoming: Wellbeing Seminars

Meaning at Work

12 June 2025

Nava Ashraf (LSE)

CEP discussion papers

Meaning at work

14 May 2025

Nava Ashraf, Oriana Bandiera, Virginia Minni and Luigi Zingales

We evaluate a firm's unusual, worker-centered, solution to the agency problem: enabling employees to reduce the cost of effort rather than pushing them with performance rewards. We randomize the roll-out of the firm's "D... Read more...

Wellbeing Seminars

CANCELLED: Meaning at Work

06 March 2025

Nava Ashraf (LSE)

Development Discussion Papers

Losing Prosociality in the Quest for Talent? Sorting, Selection, and Productivity in the Delivery of Public Services

28 July 2014

Nava Ashraf, Oriana Bandiera and Scott Lee

We embed a field experiment in a nationwide recruitment drive for nurses in Zambia to test whether career benefits attract talent at the expense of prosocial motivation. We randomize the offer of career benefits at the r... Read more...

Development Discussion Papers

Awards Unbundled: Evidence from a Natural Field Experiment

14 August 2013

Nava Ashraf, Oriana Bandiera and Scott Lee

Organizations often use awards to incentivize performance. We design a field experiment to unbundle the mechanisms through which awards may affect behavior: by facilitating social comparison and by conferring recognition... Read more...

Development Discussion Papers

No Margin, no Mission? A Field Experiment on Incentives for public service delivery

01 January 2012

Nava Ashraf, Oriana Bandiera and Kelsey Jack

A substantial body of research investigates the design of incentives in firms, yet less is known about incentives in organizations that hire individuals to perform tasks with positive social spillovers. We conduct a fiel... Read more...