The Department of Economics is thrilled to announce the recent hire of Emma Riley. She will start with the department this fall as a tenure track Assistant Professor. Riley was our top candidate for the position.
Emma Riley received her PhD in Economics from the University of Oxford in September of 2019. Her research is in development economics, and her job market paper, “Resisting sharing pressure in the household using mobile money: Experimental evidence on microenterprise investment in Uganda,” examined the impact of disbursing microfinance loans via mobile money on the growth of female-owned micro-enterprises. She was awarded the Edgeworth Prize for Best Doctoral Thesis for her work entitled, “Essays on Mobile Money Services, Microenterprises and Role Models in Developing Countries.”
Prior to her PhD studies, Riley received her MPhil in Economics, with distinction, from the University of Oxford in 2015. She completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Cambridge, where she received her BA in Economics in 2010, with first-class honors.
Since completing her PhD studies, Emma Riley has been working as a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Oxford, affiliated with the department of Economics and the Centre for the Study of African Economies. Her research has a regional focus on Sub-Saharan Africa, and primarily utilizes large-scale randomized field experiments. She has on-going research looking at the impact of digital financial technologies on female enterprises and studying the effects of a village-level poverty alleviation program on household welfare.
Emma Riley and her husband will be moving to the Seattle area from the United Kingdom this fall.
The Department would like to thank all those who helped in the recruitment of our candidates, and the organization of a virtual visit to campus, to keep all participants safe given the current pandemic. We would like to especially thank the search committee members, Yanqin Fan, Alan Griffith, Rachel Heath, Jing Tao, and Eric Zivot.