CV
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Employment
- Postdoctoral Fellow, gui2de / McCourt School of Public Policy, Georgetown University, 2024–present
Education
- Ph.D., Economics, University of Delaware, 2024
- Committee: Adrienne Lucas (chair), Francisco Costa, Sabrin Beg, Kimberly Oremus
- M.S., Economics and Applied Econometrics, University of Delaware, 2021
- M.A., International Development, Georgetown University, 2019 (Thesis of the Year)
- B.S., Mathematics and Statistics, Egerton University, Kenya, 2010
Fields
- Primary: Development Economics; Economics of Education and Human Capital; Labor Economics
- Secondary: Environmental Economics; Forced Displacement and Refugees
Other Professional Experience
- Consultant, World Bank, 2018–2020; 2024–present
- Senior Research Fellow / Research Manager / Coordinator / Associate / Data Analyst, Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA), Kenya, 2010–2017 and 2020
- Managed impact-evaluation portfolios (budgets approaching USD 1M) for M. Kremer, E. Miguel, P. Jakiela, O. Ozier, D. Pomeranz, and L. Casaburi
Publications
- Brudevold-Newman, A., M. Honorati, Ipapa, G., P. Jakiela, and O. Ozier (2024). “A Firm of One’s Own: Experimental Evidence on Credit Constraints and Occupational Choice.” Review of Economics and Statistics. doi:10.1162/rest_a_01529
Working Papers
- Ipapa, G. “The Hidden Costs of Recycling: Lead Exposure and Student Learning.” Job Market Paper. Estimates the causal effect of battery-recycling lead exposure on children’s learning in Kenya using national administrative test data; losses are twice as large at schools closest to the plants and exceed the gains from leading school-based interventions.
Work in Progress
- “Saturating the Safety Net: Cash Transfers, Skills, and Spillovers in an Urban Refugee Economy,” with Andrew Zeitlin, Billy Jack, and Alex Wendo. Randomized saturation-design RCT, ~4,000 refugee and host households, urban Nairobi; AEA-registered pre-analysis plan. Baseline and three quarterly follow-ups complete; endline underway.
- Ipapa, G. “Groundless Claims: Property Rights When Land Ceases to Exist.” Extends the Besley (1995) framework to climate-driven land loss; calibrated to Kenya’s Rift Valley lakes. Draft in preparation.
- Ipapa, G. “Property Rights, Climate Displacement, and Household Welfare: Evidence from Kenya’s Rising Lakes.” Tests how tenure status shapes compensation, adaptation, and recovery after slow-onset displacement, combining satellite-derived lake-expansion measures (2005–2025) with a planned household survey.
- Ipapa, G. “Cash, Caregiving, and the Youngest Refugees: Early Childhood Development Effects of Unconditional Transfers and Business Training in Displaced Households in Nairobi.” Adds a dedicated early-childhood-development arm (ages 0–8; CREDI and IDELA assessments) to the Nairobi cash-and-training RCT, identifying effects of pairing training with cash and of earlier cash receipt, plus community-level spillovers. Study design phase.
- “Livelihoods, Allocation, and Early Childhood Development in Refugee Graduation Programs,” with Andrew Zeitlin and Gloria Ayesiga. Graduation programs in two Uganda refugee settlements (Palabek and Kiryandongo): a natural experiment from a program discontinuation and a randomized staggered rollout of playgroup and coaching components. Study design phase.
- “Closing the Chain: From Used Lead-Acid Battery Recycling to Children’s Blood Lead, Learning, and Policy in Kenya,” with Anirban Basu, Arijeet Mitra, and Kathrin Schilling. Lead-isotope source attribution, blood-lead biomonitoring, and learning assessments for 3,120 children across the 26 recycling sites of the job market paper’s natural experiment and matched controls, delivering an in-situ blood-lead-to-learning dose-response from an informal-recycling setting. Study design phase.
Research Funding
- J-PAL Social Protection Initiative, Full RCT Award (Co-PI), urban refugee cash-transfer RCT: USD 81,340 (2026)
- IKEA Foundation (Co-PI), urban refugee cash-transfer RCT: USD 691,000 (2024); USD 92,237 (2025)
- J-PAL King Climate Action Initiative, Research Travel and Project Development Grant (PI), 2022
- IZA/DFID Growth and Labour Markets in Low-Income Countries (GLM-LIC) (Co-PI), 2018
Awards & Honors
- Sally Latham Dissertation Research Award, University of Delaware, 2024
- Sloan/Berkeley Environmental and Energy Economics Fellowship, 2023
- Philadelphia Federal Reserve Mentorship Fellowship, 2023
- University of Delaware Summer Research Fellowship, 2022
- Georgetown University Thesis of the Year, 2019
Presentations
- 2025: First Annual Research Conference on Global Lead Exposure (Washington, DC)
- 2023: AERC Senior Policy Seminar XXV (Nairobi); Sloan/Berkeley Graduate Workshop in Environmental and Energy Economics (Berkeley); Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia; AERE Energy, Environment and Transportation Workshop; University of Delaware Economics Seminar
Teaching
- Instructor of record, Development Economics (undergraduate), University of Delaware, 2023–2024
- Graduate Teaching Assistant (Microeconomics, Macroeconomics), University of Delaware, 2019–2022; Georgetown University, 2017–2019
Professional Service
- Founder and organizer, Graduate Student Research Seminar, University of Delaware
- Founder, AfriKa Policy Students Association, Georgetown University
- Referee, Research in Comparative and International Education
Skills and Languages
- Software: Stata, R, Python, Julia, MATLAB; SurveyCTO, CsPro, Blaise; Git/GitHub, LaTeX, Quarto; large-data management
- Languages: English (fluent), Kiswahili (fluent), Ateso (native), Luhya (basic)
References
