Natalie Bau is an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto and a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholar. She is interested in development and education economics with a special emphasis on the industrial organization of education markets.
This study evaluates the long-term effects of a randomised control trial that taught Zambian adolescent girls negotiation skills in 2013. The study focused on adolescent girls both because growing evidence suggests that adolescence is a critical period for the development of non-cognitive interpersonal skills (Choudhury, Blakemore, and Charman, 2006), and because...
4 Nov 2019 | Nava Ashraf, Natalie Bau, Kathleen McGinn, Corrine Low, Charity Banda
Leveraging the cultural practice of bride price could help amplify investments in female education and improve effects of large-scale school-building programmes. Without other subsidies, well-intentioned activism against bride-price may cause more harm than good for investing in girls’ education. Bride price, a common custom in parts of sub-Saharan Africa and Asia,...
10 Oct 2016 | Nava Ashraf, Natalie Bau, Nathan Nunn, Alessandra Voena
Differences in productivity explain much of the gap in incomes between rich and poor countries. A growing strand of research suggests that these differences in productivity are driven by capital misallocation: more productive firms in low income countries cannot obtain capital to expand their operations. If this is the case, policies that promote better capital allocation...
19 Aug 2016 | Natalie Bau, Jesse Schreger