Rachel Glennerster

Rachel Glennerster (born 21 October 1965) is a British economist. She is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago. She has been announced as the new president for the Center for Global Development, starting in September 2024.

Education Glennerster received her bachelor's of arts degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics from Oxford University in 1988, where she was a member of Somerville College. and a development associate at the Harvard Institute for International Development in 1996-97.

From 2004 to 2017, Glennerster was executive director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

In 2021, Glennerster joined the University of Chicago as Associate Professor of Economics in the Division of Social Science.

In May 2024, the Center for Global Development announced that Glennerster would be its next president, starting September 2024. She succeeded Masood Ahmed, who had led the organization for seven years. The Center for Global Development is a nonprofit think tank based in Washington, D.C., focused on international development.

Initiatives In 2007, Glennerster helped establish the Deworm the World Initiative, a program that targets increased access to education and improved health from the elimination of intestinal worms for at-risk children and has helped "deworm" millions of children worldwide.

She has been a member of Giving What We Can, an effective altruism organization whose members pledge to give 10% of their income to effective charities. She joined the initiative at its inception in 2009.

Research Glennerster's areas of research includes and focuses on randomized trials of health, education, microcredit, women’s empowerment, and governance. Geographically, her research has spanned West Africa and South Asia, including countries such as Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone, Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan.

Findings of her research include:

Community-driven development programs, a popular strategy for foreign aid donors, have a positive short-run effect on local public goods provision and economic outcomes, but little effect on sustained improvements in collective action and inclusion of marginalized groups. This evidence is based on randomized allocation of community-driven development programs across regions in Sierra Leone (with Katherine Casey and Edward Miguel). A randomized evaluation on the impact of microfinance in India showed that microcredit group-based lending had little impact on consumption, health, education, women's empowerment, average business profits, starting a new business, and on average monthly expenditure per capita. Yet positive effects were found on durable goods expenditure and business investments (with Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, and Cynthia Kinnan). In a research of behavioral economics of complying with tuberculosis medication in Pakistan, researches measured the impact of daily SMS medication reminders of treatment outcomes to patients of tuberculosis. No impact was found between the SMS messages and patients' self-reported adherence to treatment regimes, physical health, and psychological health. This research was conducted with Aamir Khan and Shama Mohammed. In a 2023 study, she estimated the global losses from pandemics to be over $800 billion annually.

Books Glennerster is the coauthor of Running Randomized Evaluations, a book on running randomized impact evaluations in practice in developing countries, and Strong Medicine: Creating Incentives for Pharmaceutical Research on Neglected Diseases, a book that strategizes incentives for developers to undertake the costly research needed to develop vaccines.

She is cited as among the top 2% of female economists as of June 2024, according to IDEAS/RePEC.