Stuart Russell

I am an Economist (YP) in the Public Institutions, Data, and Analytics unit of the World Bank's Governance Global Practice. I joined the World Bank through the Young Professionals Program. I have a Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a B.A. in political science and economics from Swarthmore College.

I am broadly interested in the political economy of international development with a substantive focus on bureaucracies and a regional focus on francophone West Africa. My dissertation project analyzes the politics of public procurement in Burkina Faso. I am particularly interested in the strategies political elites use to manipulate the procurement system and finance political campaigns.

Most of my research projects leverage large, administrative datasets scraped from government records. For instance, as part of my dissertation project, I built a database of publicly available procurement records in Burkina. I also have training in randomized experiments, behavioral games, and survey design.

My research has been funded by the MIT GOVLAB, the MIT Center for International Studies and the MIT Political Methodology Lab. Beyond MIT, my research has been generously supported by the West Africa Research Association, the Governance and Local Development Institute, and the Open Contracting Partnership.

Prior to starting graduate school, I worked for the public health non-profit Population Services International in Dakar, Senegal and the Center for International Development at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA.

During graduate school, I worked for IDinsight and the Development Impact Evaluation group at the World Bank. I am fluent in French and have lived and worked in France, Senegal, and Morocco. I have also conducted extensive field work in many countries across sub-Saharan Africa.

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