Paul Gertler

Paul Gertler is the Li Ka Shing Professor of Economics at University of California, Berkeley, where he holds appointments in the Haas School of Business and the School of Public Health.

He is also the Director of UC Berkeley’s Graduate Program in Health Management, Scientific Director of the Center for Effective Global Action, and on the Academic Steering Committee of the Blum Center for Developing Economies. He received his PhD in Economics from the University of Wisconsin in 1985 and prior to UC Berkeley held academic appointments at Harvard, RAND, and SUNY Stony Brook.

Dr. Gertler is an internationally recognised expert in impact evaluation. Dr. Gertler was Chief Economist of the Human Development Network of the World Bank from 2004-2007 and the Founding Chair of the Board of Directors of the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie) from 2009-2012.  At the World Bank he led an effort to institutionalise and scale up impact evaluation for learning what works in human development. At Berkeley he teaches courses in applied impact evaluation at both the graduate and undergraduate levels as well as in an executive education program for policymakers. He is the author of the best selling textbook Impact Evaluation in Practice published by the The World Bank Press.

He has been a Principal Investigator on a large number of at-scale multi-site impact evaluations including Mexico’s CCT program, Progresa/Oportunidades, and Rwanda’s Health Care Pay-for-Performance scheme.  He has published results from impact evaluations extensively in both scientific and policy journals on early childhood development, education, fertility and contraceptive use, health, HIV-AIDS, energy and climate change, housing, job training, poverty alleviation, labour markets, and water and sanitation. He was awarded the Kenneth Arrow Award for best paper in health economics in 1996. He holds a PhD in economics from the University of Wisconsin.