Africa Initiative

Bryce Steinberg is the IJC Assistant Professor of Economics and International and Public Affairs at Brown University. Steinberg's research has focused on households' decisions to invest in education in the developing world and how market forces and government programs can affect these decisions. Her dissertation work showed that while increased wages can be good for investment in very young children in rural India, for older children, higher wages can lead families to substitute out of human capital investment and into productive work. Her current research centers on primary data collection and several randomized controlled trials at the University of Zambia, exploring barriers to women’s tertiary education in Sub-Saharan Africa. She has authored several papers, including “The Right to Education Act: Trends in Enrollment, Test Scores, and School Quality” and “Water, Health, and Wealth.” Her work has appeared in leading journals such as the Journal of Development Economics and the Journal of Political Economy.