Oeindrila Dube

Oeindrila Dube is an economist and political scientist currently serving as the Philip K. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies at the University of Chicago, Harris School of Public Policy. She is a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and co-director of the Crime, Violence, and Conflict Initiative at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab.
Dube's research interests are primarily focused on poverty, violence, and crime in developing countries. She has studied the causes and consequences of conflict in Colombia and Mexico, in addition to the impact of cognitive factors on violence.
==Biography==
Dube received her BA in Public Policy from Stanford University, MPhil in Economics from the University of Oxford, and PhD in Public Policy from Harvard University, where she was a student of Sendhil Mullainathan, Rohini Pande, Lawrence Katz, and Dani Rodrik. In 2002, she received a Rhodes Scholarship.
After completing her PhD, Dube joined the Center for Global Development as a post-doctoral fellow, followed by New York University as an Assistant Professor. In 2016, she moved to the University of Chicago, where she occupies the Philip K. Pearson Professorship of Global Conflict Studies.
In line with her research, Dube is affiliated with several research institutes, such as the National Bureau of Economic Research and Centre for Economic Policy Research. She has held editorial positions at the Review of Economics and Statistics and Journal of Development Economics, and currently co-directs the J-PAL Crime, Violence, and Conflict Initiative with Chris Blattman.
Dube is the sister of labor economist Arindrajit Dube, with whom she co-authored a paper. She is married to Dan Godsel, former commander of the Chicago Police Department Training Academy.
==Research==
Dube's research broadly examines the political and economic development of societies, particularly as it relates to crime and violence. Her work leverages both experimental and quasi-experimental research designs.
===Crime and Violence===
Dube's early work examined the causes and consequences of gang and paramilitary violence in Latin America. For example, in a paper in the American Political Science Review, Dube shows that the expiration of the U.S. Federal Assault Weapons Ban in 2004 increased homicides and gun seizures in Mexican municipalities close to border states without strong state gun laws. In other work, she shows that weather shocks that decrease the price of maize encourage substitution by Mexican farmers into opium and marijuana, increasing downstream gang violence.
In work on Colombia, Dube and Suresh Naidu show that increases in U.S. military aid increase the prevalence of paramilitary attacks near U.S. military bases, decrease anti-narcotics operations by Colombia operatives, and have no effect on the production of coca.
===Pandemic Response===
Another line of Dube's work concerns pandemic response, particularly as it pertains to trust in medicine. Through a randomized controlled trial in Sierra Leone, Dube and co-authors show that health clinics exposed to a community monitoring scheme before the onset of the 2014 West African Ebola crisis saw more positive cases but fewer deaths in response to the disease. The results suggest that the intervention improved trust in medical institutions, encouraging and de-stigmatizing testing.
Based on her work on Ebola, Dube published several New York Times pieces on optimal individual responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, including an article leveraging anonymized cellphone location data to assess the relative risks of visiting particular retail establishments.
===Female Leadership===
Dube has also pursued research on conflict in historical perspective. In a paper co-authored with S.P. Harish, Dube shows that European states ruled by queens between 1480 and 1913 were 27% more likely to go to war than their male counterparts, with results especially strong for leaders without husbands, or whose husbands did not hold a position of coregency. She also finds that women are more likely to gain new territory.
Category:Economists
Category:Political scientists
Category:University of Chicago alumni
Category:Stanford University alumni
Category:Harvard University alumni