Jessica Goldberg

Jessica Goldberg is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Global Development and an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Maryland. Her research focuses on the ways that people in developing countries earn, spend, and save money. She is particularly interested in how financial market imperfections, behavioral factors, or other obstacles to borrowing and saving may distort decisions about working and consuming. Currently, she is involved in several field experiments in Malawi. She is studying how people in rural communities adjust their labor supply to changes in wages and shocks to non-wage income; collaborating with researchers at the World Bank and officials at the Malawi Social Action Fund to study the program's roles in consumption smoothing and investment in fertilizer; and working with a microfinance organization to learn how commitment savings accounts can benefit smallholder farmers and wage workers.