About

Emily L. Breza is the Frederic E. Abbe Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Her research focuses on development economics, with particular emphasis on financial markets, labor markets, and social networks. She holds a prominent role as a board member and finance co-chair of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (JPAL). Additionally, she is affiliated with several leading research organizations including the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the International Growth Centre (IGC), the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR), and Y-RISE. Her work contributes to understanding the dynamics of economic development through the lenses of market interactions and social structures.

Research topics

• Information Retrieval
• Computer Science
• Data Mining
• Econometrics
• Theoretical computer science
• Mathematics
• Statistics
• Nursing
• Engineering
• Medicine
• Data science

Selected publications

• The Rise and Regulation of Digital Credit: Lessons from Indonesia

  Washington, DC: World Bank eBooks · 2026-01-21

  bookOpen access

  This paper examines the rise of fintech lending in Indonesia, using a dataset of more than 139,000 individual credit records representative of the full spectrum of consumer loans in the country. The analysis reveals that fintech lending has become deeply embedded in Indonesia’s financial landscape, with more than 40 percent of borrowers holding at least one fintech loan at the end of the sample period. While digital lenders have expanded financial inclusion by reaching significant numbers of previously unbanked households, they remain limited in their geographical reach, primarily finance consumption, and account for only a small share of total consumer credit. Over time, a substantial share of borrowers transition from high-interest fintech loans to more affordable conventional credit. However, this expansion of access brings new challenges: default rates among borrowers who obtain their first loan from a digital lender are 5 to 7 percentage points higher than among borrowers who start with non-fintech loans, and elevated default risks persist even after borrowers graduate to lower-interest rate conventional credit. The paper concludes by assessing the effects of recent regulatory reforms --such as interest rate caps and harmonized reporting standards for digital and conventional loans-- and offers policy recommendations to maximize the benefits of digital financial inclusion while safeguarding credit market stability and financial consumer protection.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Labor Markets in Developing Countries

  Annual Review of Economics · 2025-06-17 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The process of development is accompanied by marked changes in the structure of the labor market. We lay out a broad set of stylized features that distinguish labor markets in developing countries from those in richer countries. We organize our review around one particularly striking difference: In poor countries, working-age individuals are employed in wage work only 20–50% of the time. There is evidence that this low wage employment reflects high levels of involuntary unemployment (often masked by self-employment) along with frictions such as wage rigidity, market power, and search-and-matching frictions. At the same time, there is growing documentation that workers prefer self-employment or unemployment to many of the wage jobs that are available to them, especially low-skill work in the formal sector. We offer evidence on several ways in which poverty itself can dampen labor supply, so that low labor supply may be an outcome of underdevelopment. Throughout our review, we highlight three core aspects of poverty—missing markets, the importance of social ties, and institutional irregularity—that are relevant for understanding how labor markets change in response to, and help facilitate, the process of development.

  PublisherDOI

• Labor Markets in Developing Countries

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2025-06-01

  reportOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  The process of development is accompanied by marked changes in the structure of the labor market.We lay out a broad set of stylized features that distinguish developing country labor markets from those in richer countries.We organize our review around one particularly striking difference: in poor countries, working age individuals are employed in wage work only 20-50% of the time.There is evidence that this low wage employment reflects high levels of involuntary unemployment (often masked by self-employment), along with frictions such as wage rigidity, market power, and search and matching frictions.At the same time, there is growing documentation that workers prefer selfemployment or unemployment to many of the wage jobs that are available to them, especially lowskill work in the formal sector.We offer evidence on several ways in which poverty itself can dampen labor supply, so that "low" labor supply may itself be an outcome of under-development.Throughout our review, we highlight how three core aspects of poverty-missing markets, the importance of social ties, and institutional irregularity-are important for understanding why developing country labor markets may behave differently from those in richer settings.This has relevance for understanding how labor markets change in response to, and help facilitate, the process of development.

  PublisherDOI

• Generalizability with ignorance in mind: learning what we do (not) know for archetypes discovery

  ArXiv.org · 2025-01-23

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  When studying policy interventions, researchers often pursue two goals: i) identifying for whom the program has the largest effects (heterogeneity) and ii) determining whether those patterns of treatment effects have predictive power across environments (generalizability). We develop a framework to learn when and how to partition observations into groups of individual and environmental characterstics within which treatment effects are predictively stable, and when instead extrapolation is unwarranted and further evidence is needed. Our procedure determines in which contexts effects are generalizable and when, instead, researchers should admit ignorance and collect more data. We provide a decision-theoretic foundation, derive finite-sample regret guarantees, and establish asymptotic inference results. We illustrate the benefits of our approach by reanalyzing a multifaceted anti-poverty program across six countries.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Labor Markets in Developing Countries

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Using Financial Incentives and Screening to Increase Engagement with Mental Health Services among College Students in Chennai, India

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2025-02-13

  dataset
  PublisherDOI

• Using Financial Incentives and Screening to Increase Engagement with Mental Health Services among College Students in Chennai, India

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2025-02-13

  dataset
  PublisherDOI

• Take-Up of Agricultural Insurance in India

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2024-08-09

  dataset
  PublisherDOI

• Can a Trusted Messenger Change Behavior When Information Is Plentiful? Evidence from the First Months of the COVID-19 Pandemic in West Bengal

  The Review of Economics and Statistics · 2024-09-16 · 9 citations

  article

  Abstract Can information from a credible messenger shift behavior in an information-saturated environment? In a randomized controlled trial involving twenty-eight million individuals in West Bengal, we find that SMS-delivered video messages containing information about COVID-19 symptoms and health-preserving behaviors recorded by a credible messenger increased adherence to targeted and non-targeted preventive behaviors, measured by two objective measures (symptoms reported to a health worker, and phone usage at home), as well as self-reported behaviors. We find large spillovers onto non-targeted recipients. Credible light-touch messaging can play an important role in crisis response, even when similar information is widely available.

  PublisherDOI

• Take-Up of Agricultural Insurance in India

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2024-08-09

  dataset
  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Relative Pay Comparisons in the Workplace: Field Evidence on Effort and Labor Supply

  NSF · $110k · 2016–2020

• RAPID: COVID-19 Information Campaigns for Vulnerable Populations

  NSF · $200k · 2020–2022

Frequent coauthors

• Arun G. Chandrasekhar

  National Bureau of Economic Research

  169 shared

• Esther Duflo

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  113 shared

• Abhijit Banerjee

  94 shared

• Benjamin Olken

  80 shared

• Marcella Alsan

  77 shared

• Paul Goldsmith-Pinkham

  Yale University

  71 shared

• Abhijit Chowdhury

  Liver Foundation West Bengal

  45 shared

• Lucy Ogbu-Nwobodo

  University of California, San Francisco

  31 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Economics

  Harvard University

• B.A., Economics

  Harvard University