Sam Asher

Sam Asher is Assistant Professor of International Economics at Johns Hopkins SAIS and cofounder of Development Data Lab, which works to maximize the value of underutilized data for policy makers, civil society, and the private sector in India and beyond. Sam’s research seeks to understand the microeconomic determinants of economic growth, urbanization, and economic opportunity for the poor. Together with Paul Novosad and a wide range of collaborators, he has built a high spatial resolution data platform and new analytic tools to analyze economic development at the local level in India. Current projects are examining the causes and consequences of educational mobility, segregation, and constraints on local growth across India’s 600,000 towns and villages. His research has been published in multiple top economics journals, including the American Economic Review, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, and the Review of Economics and Statistics. Prior to joining Johns Hopkins, he was an economist at the World Bank Development Research Group.