Asim Ijaz Khwaja

Asim Ijaz Khwaja is the Sumitomo-Foundation for Advanced Studies on International Development Professor of International Finance and Development at the Harvard Kennedy School, and Co-Director of Evidence for Policy Design (EPoD). He was selected as a Carnegie Scholar in 2009 to pursue research on how religious institutions impact individual beliefs.

His areas of interest include economic development, finance, education, political economy, institutions, and contract theory/mechanism design. His research combines extensive fieldwork, rigorous empirical analysis, and microeconomic theory to answer questions that are motivated by and engage with policy. His recent work ranges from understanding market failures in emerging financial markets to examining the private education market in low-income countries.

Khwaja received BS degrees in economics and in mathematics with computer science from MIT and a PhD in economics from Harvard.