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Northwestern Roberta Buffett Institute for Global Affairs

Buffett Q&A: Poverty Traps & the Search for Solutions with Christopher Udry, Buffett Faculty Fellow

August 21, 2026


For this installment of our Buffett Q&A series profiling faculty and students in the Roberta Buffett Institute community, we spoke with development economist Christopher Udry, Robert E. & Emily King Professor of Economics at the Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences, 2024–25 Buffett Faculty Fellow, and co-director of the Global Poverty Research Lab (GPRL) at the Kellogg School of Management. GPRL aims to establish the causes of and solutions to global poverty through interdisciplinary research and engagement.


What is the central focus of your research, and what experiences inspired that focus? 

The central question that has guided my research is why poor people remain poor. What's stopping people from being able to improve their lives and the lives of their children?  

When I finished undergraduate studies, I went into the Peace Corps in Ghana and spent two years as a high school teacher of math and economics. 

I met the daughter of a cook at the school who just astonished me, clearly this brilliant kid. But at the time in Ghana, education for girls was very difficult to get in the part of Ghana I was living in, and she was going to stop school. The loss to the world of that initiative, intelligence, and creativity is a tragedy that just shadows the rest of my life. 

What did your Buffett Faculty Fellowship enable you to accomplish? 

I was able to put finishing touches on a number of projects. I've been working with colleagues here at Buffett on poverty traps, the idea that there are forces that can keep the poor in poverty and keep those who aren’t poor out of poverty. My colleagues and I spent a good part of that year trying to understand why it's so difficult and potential paths forward.  

The second project I was working on was trying to draw together evidence from across the developing world about different anti-poverty programs and policies—for example, cash transfers—and why they work in some places and not others.  

It's a very popular idea now, and one that I think is largely right, that an effective way of fighting poverty is to provide cash to people. If these poverty trap stories are correct, then giving people enough money to get over that hump might be enough. Frustratingly, the programs are different. This one is giving $100, or this one is received in 12 monthly lumps; this one has it received all at once. So, we tried to find ways of characterizing the dimensions of the programs. 

  • Read “Tackling Global Poverty Takes More Than Cash,” an overview of Buffett Faculty Fellows Udry and Karlan’s collaborative research on the power of including psychosocial interventions—such as group problem-solving—alongside economic ones. 
How have you continued to build upon this research? 

Through the Global Poverty Research Lab (GPRL), I continue to conduct and support research investigating poverty around the world. We have a strong focus on supporting graduate student and faculty research, providing undergraduate research opportunities, and assisting with data management.  

One of the primary tools that we think has been underused tremendously is the pooling of data, letting data speak to each other. We think GPRL can become a central resource for bringing together data from surveys and experiments done around the world to provide infrastructure for further research. One of the aspects of that research is trying to find a way of using research done in one place to inform our knowledge about other places or other times. What are the lessons from that study that can apply to another lesson and another context? 

I also continue to lead the long-term nationwide Ghana Socioeconomic Panel Survey, which aims to shed new light on long-run processes of economic development through a repeated survey of about 5,000 households spread across Ghana. GPRL has conducted the survey jointly with the University of Ghana for the past 16 years. 

Do you have any new research on the horizon? 

My new research that I'm just getting established looks at informal “artisanal” mining in Ghana. Some of the communities that were part of the Ghana Socioeconomic Panel Survey were experiencing the effects of the introduction of artisanal gold mining in the area. As the gold price goes up as mining expands, we're seeing more commercial mining, but we're also seeing more informal mining: small scale mining done by individuals who aren't regulated.  

I visited several of these mines in villages where we had been working for a long time and was quite surprised by my conversations. It appeared that farmers were getting paid for the land that they were giving up, and they were getting paid approximately what the value of their profit from farming would have been. So that seems to imply that the farmers are mostly voluntarily doing this. The workers are being paid very well, and they're very happy about it, but they're also suffering health consequences, so that's more nuanced to understand.  

I spent a good amount of time during my Buffett Faculty Fellowship in Ghana talking with people to understand the economics of this new sector and how it's affecting communities—the environmental, health, and economic consequences. 

What motivates you to continue this work? 

I honestly believe that the persistence of global poverty is an unsustainable, unforgivable sin. It cannot be the case that where you're born determines whether you can live a full life. I want to understand the causes of that and the policies that can alleviate poverty anywhere in the globe. 

Explore Professor Udry’s latest research publications >>