Curriculum Vitae

Sara Lowes is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of California, San Diego. She was previously a Postdoctoral Fellow at the at the Stanford King Center on Global Development and an Assistant Professor of Economics at Bocconi University. 

She graduated from Harvard University in May 2017 with a Ph.D. from the Political Economy and Government program (Economics track). Her dissertation received the Ronald Coase Best Dissertation Award from the Society for Institutional & Organizational Economics. She graduated from Middlebury College in 2007 with a B.A. in Economics and Political Science.

She is a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), an Affiliate of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar with the Institutions, Organizations & Growth research program, an Affiliate of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), and an Affiliate of the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA). In graduate school she was a recipient of the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship.

​Prior to graduate school, she worked in Vietnam for a microfinance organization and in Uganda for Innovations for Poverty Action managing randomized controlled trials of development projects. She subsequently worked as a Research Assistant at the Economic Growth Center at Yale University and at Harvard Business School.  She also spent a summer studying Arabic in Jordan as a US State Department Critical Language Scholar.

Her research interests are at the intersection of development economics, political economy, and economic history. Most recently, she has been working in the Democratic Republic of Congo. She also has research experience in Uganda, Zambia, Ghana, Nigeria, Bolivia, and Vietnam.