Karla Hoff

Karla Hoff teaches Behavioral Development Economics at Columbia University and is working on a book, The Invisible Hand of Culture: New Understandings of Social Progress and Societal Rigidities for Columbia University Press. She was the Co-Director of the World Development Report 2015 and served in the World Bank's Development Research Group from 1999-2020. She has published papers in the American Economic Review that explain how segregation between renters and homeowners may deepen poverty, how cueing a stigmatized social identity depresses cognitive performance, and how Big Bang privatization in Russia impeded the emergence of a political demand for the rule of law. She co-edited two books, The Economics of Rural Organization and Poverty Traps. She was a National Merit Scholar at Wellesley College and a Peace Corps volunteer in Ivory Coast. She has a PhD in economics from Princeton University.