Garance Genicot


Garance Genicot is a Belgian-American economist and Associate Professor of Economics at Georgetown University. She is a member of the Core Group at Theoretical Research in Development Economics, a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research Development Economics Program, a Fellow at the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development and a Research Fellow at the IZA Institute. Since 2013, she has been an External Member of the World Bank Research Management Committee. A more detailed overview of her work can be found on , Research Papers in Economics.
Genicot's research focuses on risk sharing, intra-household bargaining, informal credit markets, social networks and inequality. Her highly cited work on group formation and networks focuses on how the interplay of personal incentives and group or network incentives impact economic outcomes, and has applications in a variety of fields within economics, such as economic development, conflict, and labor economics. She studied the relationship between improved property rights for women in India and the incidence of suicide among both men and women.
Her work with her PhD advisor, Kaushik Basu and Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz studies the responsiveness of labor supply to wages, an idea that is central to the classical theory of economics. They argue that at low wage levels, households are financially insecure and would therefore be willing to supply more labor to hedge themselves against economic shocks. This is called the “added labor effect” and has important implications to the ongoing minimum wage debate.
Her work on aspirations and inequality with Debraj Ray shows the discouraging impact of aspirations that are too far from a person's situation. This study has wide implications in developing policy, especially in terms of education investments.

Editorial Work

Garance Genicot serves as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Development Economics and as an Associate Editor for the Berkeley Electronic Journal for Theoretical Economics. She serves as a referee for a number of academic journals in economics.

Education and Biography

Born in Huy, Garance Genicot completed her undergraduate studies in Economics at the Université de Liège, Belgium, in 1995. She then received her Ph.D. in Economics from Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, USA.
Genicot has held positions at the University of California, Irvine. She has held Visiting Assistant Professor positions at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, New York University, London School of Economics and University College of London. She was a Visiting Faculty member at the World Bank in 2011. She has received research fellowships at the Russell Sage Foundation and the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation In 2016, Genicot was a visiting professor at GREQAM, at Aix-Marseille University.

Selected works