Isaac Mbiti

Biography & Research

Isaac Mbiti is a professor of poverty and education at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame and a core-affiliated faculty member of the Pulte Institute for Global Development. Mbiti is also an affiliated researcher at the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development, the Institute of Labor Economics, the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab and the National Bureau of Economic Research. He serves as co-director for the Journal of Human Resources and as Co-Scientific Director at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab Africa. 

Mbiti’s research focuses on the development of human capital in Sub-Saharan Africa, with a particular interest in the role of education policies and job training programs in improving skills and livelihoods. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Brown University.

Recent Work

• “Can Financial Incentives to Firms Improve Apprentice Training? Experimental Evidence from Ghana,” with Gabriel Brown, Morgan Hardy, Jamie McCasland and Isabelle Salcher (forthcoming, American Economic Review: Insights)
• "Designing Effective Teacher Performance Pay Programs: Experimental Evidence from Tanzania," with Mauricio Romero and Youdi Schipper (The Economic Journal)
• “Can School Rankings Improve Performance? Evidence from a Nationwide Reform in Tanzania,” with Jacobus Cilliers and Andrew Zeitlin (Journal of Human Resources)
• "Inputs, Incentives, and Complementarities in Education: Experimental Evidence from Tanzania," with Karthik Muralidharan, Mauricio Romero, Youdi Schipper, Constantine Manda and Rakesh Rajani (Quarterly Journal of Economics)