Karla Hoff

Karla Hoff is a Lead Economist at the World Bank and a visiting professor at Columbia University. Her research focuses on how economic, political, and social structure, through its effects on how people think, can create barriers to upward mobility and economic development. She co-directed the World Bank’s World Development Report 2015: Mind, Society, and Behavior, one of the first syntheses of behavioural development economics. Ongoing work draws on psychology, sociology, and anthropology to show that prototypes and narratives shape how boundedly rational people process information and that interventions can change cultural categories in ways that emancipate people. Karla is an Associate Editor of the World Bank Economic Review and has co-edited two books, The Economics of Rural Organization and Poverty Traps. She was a National Merit Scholar at Wellesley College and a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Ivory Coast and earned a Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton University.