About

Oeindrila Dube is the Philip K. Pearson Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. She studies poverty, violence, and crime in countries around the world, with research focusing on how economic shocks influence conflict dynamics and how cognitive factors contribute to violence. Her research employs both quasi-experimental and experimental designs, utilizing a wide range of sources including original surveys, hand-collected records, and big data to address these questions. Her work has been published in leading journals such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Science, the Journal of Political Economy, the Review of Economic Studies, and the American Political Science Review. Dube holds multiple research affiliations, including being a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a fellow at the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), and at the Centre for Economic Policy and Research (CEPR). She is also an affiliate of the University of Chicago Crime Lab, co-leads the Crime and Violence Initiative at J-PAL, and the Socio-economic Inequalities Initiative at the Becker Friedman Institute. Prior to her current role, she was an assistant professor of politics and economics at New York University, and has worked at the World Bank, Oxfam International, and the Brookings Institution. Dube earned her PhD in Public Policy from Harvard University, an MPhil in Economics from Oxford University, and a BA in Public Policy from Stanford University, and was a Rhodes Scholar in 2002.

Research topics

• Political science
• Geography
• Economics
• Psychology
• Business

Selected publications

• Delivering Foundational Skills, Mentorship, and Agency through Remote Instruction

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2026-01-31

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  PublisherDOI

• Measuring religion from behavior: violence, climate shocks and religious adherence in Afghanistan

  London School of Economics and Political Science Research Online (London School of Economics and Political Science) · 2026-03-03

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Religion plays a fundamental role in society but is often difficult to measure. We develop a novel method for measuring religious adherence that is based on decreases in digital activity during periods set aside for prayer. We apply this approach to a dataset of roughly 23 billion phone calls to study the determinants of religious practice in Afghanistan. We find that religious adherence declines after violent attacks by Islamist insurgents but increases in response to droughts in agricultural regions. This approach creates new avenues for studying religious behavior in contexts where conventional data are unavailable or unreliable.

  Publisher

• Delivering Foundational Skills, Mentorship, and Agency through Remote Instruction

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2026-01-31

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  PublisherDOI

• Situational Decision-Making: A Training to Improve Officer Decision-Making in High-Stakes Situations

  OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) · 2024-03-05

  other

  This project will evaluate a police training program designed to improve officer decision-making in high-stakes situations. The training and evaluation have been implemented collaboratively between the Chicago Police Department and the University of Chicago Crime Lab.

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• Introduction

  Elsevier eBooks · 2024-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Resource Curse In Reverse: The Coffee Crisis And Armed Conflict In Colombia

  RePEc: Research Papers in Economics · 2024-06-04 · 20 citations

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Between 1998 and 2003 production increases in Brazil and Vietnam drove down the price of coffee by 73 percent in global markets, triggering the international coffee crisis". We examine the effect of this exogenous price shock on Colombia´s civil war, exploring whether politically-motivated violence presented different dynamics in the coffee -growing regions relative to the non- coffee regions, during the pre-crisis and crisis periods. Using a difference-in-differences framework, we find causal evidence that the steep decline in coffee prices substantially increased both the incidence and intensity of Colombia´s civil war. We also propose a simple model linking the price shock to violence and empirically examine the relative importance of three potential mechanisms. While crop substitution from coffee to coca explains very little of the variation, a disproportionate increase in poverty in coffee areas is associated with greater violence, as is a lower state capacity."

  OA PDFDOI

• A Cognitive View of Policing

  The Quarterly Journal of Economics · 2024-11-21 · 21 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract What causes adverse policing outcomes, such as excessive uses of force and unnecessary arrests? Prevailing explanations focus on problematic officers or deficient regulations and oversight. We introduce an overlooked perspective. We suggest that the cognitive demands inherent in policing can undermine officer decision making. Unless officers are prepared for these demands, they may jump to conclusions too quickly without fully considering alternative ways of seeing a situation. This can lead to adverse policing outcomes. To test this perspective, we created a new training that teaches officers to consider different ways of interpreting the situations they encounter. We evaluated this training using a randomized controlled trial with 2,070 officers from the Chicago Police Department. In a series of lab assessments, we find that treated officers were significantly more likely to consider a wider range of evidence and develop more explanations for subjects’ actions. Critically, we also find that training affected officer performance in the field, leading to reductions in uses of force, discretionary arrests, and arrests of Black civilians. Meanwhile, officer activity levels remained unchanged, and trained officers were less likely to be injured on duty. Our results highlight the value of considering the cognitive aspects of policing and demonstrate the power of using behaviorally informed approaches to improve officer decision making and policing outcomes.

  PublisherDOI

• A Cognitive View of Policing

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2023-07-07

  dataset1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• A Cognitive View of Policing

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2023-07-07

  dataset1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• A Cognitive View of Policing

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Matthew Gudgeon

  54 shared

• Samuel Bazzi

  54 shared

• Richard M. Peck

  54 shared

• Christopher Blattman

  University of Chicago

  51 shared

• Robert Blair

  University of Chicago

  49 shared

• Bilal Siddiqi

  12 shared

• Darin Christensen

  Public Policy Institute of California

  11 shared

• Johannes Haushofer

  11 shared

Awards & honors

• Rhodes Scholarship (2002)