Abdoulaye Ndiaye
Abdoulaye Ndiaye is Assistant Professor of Economics. Prior to joining NYU Stern in July 2019, Professor Ndiaye was a Research Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Professor Ndiaye’s research focuses on macroeconomics and public finance.
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Follow Abdoulaye on:
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Abdoulaye Ndiaye is Assistant Professor of Economics. Prior to joining NYU Stern in July 2019, Professor Ndiaye was a Research Economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Professor Ndiaye’s research focuses on macroeconomics and public finance.
In their own words…
IEA: Your work is in the intersection of public finance with macroeconomics. How did you get interested in these topics?
Abdoulaye: I come from a country, Senegal, that is underdeveloped and has a strong government presence. When I was a kid, I had an uncle who wore a suit and worked for a government agency, so I wanted to be like him. A government job or working with international organizations was a safe way to survive. In the 90s international organizations such as the World Bank, IMF (and the UN to some extent) were very active in Sub-Saharan Africa. When I discovered social sciences in my undergraduate studies, it was natural for me to be interested in growth and public economics. I did an internship at the UN and realized that the suit wasn’t enough and that I needed to study economics further. So I decided to apply for PhDs. The late Emmanuel Farhi got me interested in public finance, and since I am more methodologically inclined to theory, I write applied theory papers on macro and public finance topics. Since I embarked on this journey, I realized two things: (i) macroeconomics in Subsaharan countries is all about public finance and debt management through international cooperation, and (ii) there is a too strong presence of the government relative to the private sector and decentralized systems in SSA. Both are, in my view, not positive things.
IEA: You are from Senegal and have kept your interest in Sub-Saharan African countries. You were recently an advisor to the Senegalese government on Covid response. How has your background affected the topics you choose and the questions you ask in your research?
Abdoulaye: During the covid crisis there was an outbreak of covid papers at the same time. Naturally, I was asking myself what I could do to contribute socially. When the opportunity came to become an Advisor to the Minister of the Economy, Planning, and Cooperation in my home country, for their covid policy response, I decided to join and move to Senegal for 8 months. When I arrived, the government had already decided to create 65,000 jobs for the youth as a relief from the covid situation and directed the ministry of the Economy to administer the program. Most of the job categories that were selected were in the nature of providing or maintaining public goods undersupplied by the markets (street cleaning, public constructions, and reforestation) so I thought it was a sound short-term idea and had no major objections to it. My main recommendations were about better use of the resources of the national statistical agency for fine-tuning the technical parameters of the program. For more long-term measures, I worked on a policy report that reviewed the social insurance programs of the government and gave new recommendations on social and employment protection. My view is that the problem of social protection is a tricky one in developing countries. I find cash transfers expensive because they are untargeted (but at the same time, they are better than in-kind transfers which can be a logistical nightmare). At the same time, the large informal sector needs non-clientelistic help. So organizing this large sector in geographic and occupational hubs that could administer government resources for people in need, could be the second-best alternative to an unemployment insurance scheme that seems impossible to administer for informal workers. Conjointly, a funded, defined contribution, unemployment insurance scheme for workers in formal firms with tax breaks for informal firms who opted to declare their employees could be a good way to kill two birds with one stone: social protection and incentives for formalization. Both the short-term and the long-term responses fall in line with the research questions I work on. The Senegalese government is currently discussing how to implement social protection of workers with various stakeholders. Our hope is that they choose a comprehensive unemployment insurance scheme as a long-term solution.
IEA: Do you think there is a gap between the kind of economics that is practiced and valued in the U.S. and the sort of economics that is relevant and useful in low-income settings?
Abdoulaye: Certainly there is a gap in the kind of economics that is valued for top publications in the US, and the sort of large market and institutional failure economics that are relevant in many low-income settings. For instance, most theoretical public finance work takes targeting technologies for given and searches for optimal policies. Similarly, empirical public finance work has a high standard of accepting evidence mainly through RCTs and regression discontinuity designs. Both are difficult in some low income contexts and deter from meaningful work. Targeting is complex with sparse data, and the lack of large administrative datasets makes some empirical strategies harder. In joint work with Abdoulaye Cisse, Kyle Herkenhoff, and Aly Mbaye we simply set to measure the value of social insurance in Senegal. We had to run a survey 3 times to get it right. I believe that the research technology itself makes it so that there are still low-hanging fruit but essential questions to address that do not require sophisticated econometrics. But with initiatives such as the Structural Transformation and Economic Growth working group of the Center for Economic Policy and Research (CEPR, that I’m an affiliate of), things are changing, and there are more and more data sources, and high-quality public finance/dev and macro dev papers publish at top journals.
IEA: Do you have any words of advice for students of economics in African or other low-income countries as to how they can expand their networks and break into the forefront of the research world?
Abdoulaye: If you are a student in SSA, you most likely find a government job as a safe option. I can’t blame you for that, but there are other possibilities. You may trade the dreams of a suit and tie for a t-shirt or a lab coat; the continent needs many company founders and researchers. One of the most impactful things I did in my time in Senegal was to help a friend organize the Dakar Hackathon. On the economic research front, I advise students to produce a piece of research work (either in economics or mathematics) and reach out to the faculty they wish to work with. Such cold inquiries should always be accompanied by your writing sample (for faculty to assess quality) and the specific question you have: no beating around the bush. I often receive such inquiries from savvy students in India or China; I think African students should share their work more. Initiatives such as the GAIN Network are also great resources in helping graduate students applicants from low-income countries with the hidden curriculum part of the application process.