about

I am a PhD candidate in economics with an interest in the microeconomics of development. I examine how social context interacts with economic incentives to affect behavior. Methodologically, I use observational data and experimental methods to examine these questions. Currently, I am focusing on two main topics: religion and social networks.

On the former, I study the link between religion and attitudes toward cooperation. The study is partly driven by my interest in the social psychology literature on religion and cooperation. In this paper, I use the IFLS4 dataset to investigate how religious intensity correlates (and, potentially, affects) norms of intra- and inter-group cooperation in Indonesia. I also examine how social networks and institutions may have contributed to the cooperative attitudes.

On the other hand, my social networks research presently focuses on network formation. In this paper with Juan Carrillo, we use a laboratory experiment to test theories of network formation when link formation needs to be mutually agreed, but not its deletion. We consider six-node networks where the benefits from participation depend only on the component size and the cost of each link is constant. This scenario is applicable to some forms of risk-sharing networks.

past life

Before graduate school, I worked as a policy researcher in Indonesia. Throughout my professional career, I mainly worked for two institutions: as a policy researcher at CSIS (this Indonesian one, and not this one) and as a monitoring and evaluation consultant at the World Bank in Jakarta. Although trained as a programmer in my undergraduate years, I was never employed as one after graduation.

I also used to write opinion pieces and book reviews for Indonesian newspapers, mainly for this (English-language) and this (Indonesian-language) newspapers. An archive of some of my columns in English can be found here.