About

David Lagakos is a professor specializing in macroeconomics and development economics. His research has been published in prominent academic journals such as the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics. He currently serves as a co-editor of the Journal of Political Economy and an associate editor of Econometrica. Since 2016, he has been the lead academic for the International Growth Centre in Ghana, where he helps foster policy-relevant academic research on economic growth. Lagakos is also a research affiliate at the NBER, the CEPR, and BREAD, and he is a co-organizer of the annual NBER conference on Economic Growth. Prior to his current position at Boston University, he was an associate professor with tenure at the University of California San Diego and held previous roles at Arizona State University and the Federal Reserve Banks of Minneapolis and New York. He earned his PhD from UCLA in 2008 and his BA from the University of Rochester in 2001.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Economics
• Sociology
• Economic growth
• Economic geography
• Econometrics
• Statistics
• Macroeconomics
• Geography
• Demographic economics
• Development economics

Selected publications

• Data and Code for: Macroeconomic Effects of ‘Free’ Secondary Schooling in the Developing World

  ICPSR Data Holdings · 2026-01-01

  datasetOpen access

  This paper studies the macroeconomic effects of publicly funded ('free') secondary schooling in the developing world. Our analysis is based on an overlapping generations model of human capital accumulation that we estimate to match experimental evidence on the effects of scholarships for poor but talented students in Ghana. The model predicts that nationwide free secondary schooling increases average education levels but leads to only a modest gain in GDP per capita. The human capital gains from expanded education access are offset by lost income during schooling years and dampened by negative selection of new students entering secondary school. An alternative policy that spends the same resources improving school quality has significantly larger effects.

  PublisherDOI

• Data and Code for: Macroeconomic Effects of ‘Free’ Secondary Schooling in the Developing World

  ICPSR Data Holdings · 2026-01-01

  datasetOpen access

  This paper studies the macroeconomic effects of publicly funded ('free') secondary schooling in the developing world. Our analysis is based on an overlapping generations model of human capital accumulation that we estimate to match experimental evidence on the effects of scholarships for poor but talented students in Ghana. The model predicts that nationwide free secondary schooling increases average education levels but leads to only a modest gain in GDP per capita. The human capital gains from expanded education access are offset by lost income during schooling years and dampened by negative selection of new students entering secondary school. An alternative policy that spends the same resources improving school quality has significantly larger effects.

  PublisherDOI

• American Life Histories

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Dynamics of Agricultural Productivity Gaps: An Open-Economy Perspective

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  articleOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• The Spatial Distribution of Income in Cities: New Global Evidence and Theory

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Taxpayer Education and Rights: Evidence from Ghana

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2025-01-04

  datasetSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Taxpayer Education and Rights: Evidence from Ghana

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2025-01-04

  datasetSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• American Life Histories

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-01-01 · 4 citations

  report1st authorCorresponding

  What does it take to live a meaningful life? We exploit a unique corpus of over 1,400 life narratives of older Americans collected by a team of writers during the 1930s. We combine detailed human readings with large language models (LLMs) to extract systematic information on critical junctures, sources of meaning, and overall life satisfaction. Under specific conditions, LLMs can provide responses to complex questions that are indistinguishable from those of human readers, effectively passing a version of the Turing Test. We find that sources of life meaning are more varied than previous research suggested, underlining the importance of work and community contributions in addition to family and close relationships (emphasized by earlier work). The narratives also highlight gendered disparities, with women disproportionately citing adverse family events, such as the loss of a parent, underscoring their role as keepers of the kin. Our research expands our understanding of human flourishing during a transformative period in American history and establishes a robust and scalable framework for exploring subjective well-being across diverse historical and cultural contexts.

  PublisherDOI

• The Spatial Distribution of Income in Cities: New Global Evidence and Theory

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-11-01 · 1 citations

  report
  PublisherDOI

• The Dynamics of Agricultural Productivity Gaps: An Open-Economy Perspective

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-02-01

  reportOpen access

  This paper draws on cross-country census data to study how agricultural productivity gaps have evolved over the last four decades. We find little tendency for gaps to decline on average despite global decreases in agricultural employment shares. We analyze the dynamics of agricultural productivity gaps through the lens of an open-economy model of structural change. We calibrate the model using international trade data, which are measured independently from sectoral value added and employment data. Quantitatively, the model predicts that relatively faster physical productivity growth in the non-agricultural sector has, in many countries, offset the movement of labor out of agriculture, leading to persistently lower value added per worker in agriculture. Consistent with the model's predictions, previous exports by sector are strong predictors of agricultural productivity gaps in the current cross-section of countries.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Douglas Gollin

  Tufts University

  106 shared

• Michael Waugh

  Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis

  98 shared

• Alexander Bick

  85 shared

• Nicola Fuchs‐Schündeln

  81 shared

• Martina Kirchberger

  Trinity College Dublin

  53 shared

• Hitoshi Tsujiyama

  University of Surrey

  48 shared

• Benjamin Moll

  32 shared

• Tommaso Porzio

  32 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  University of California, Los Angeles

  2008

• B.A.

  University of Rochester

  2001