Contact Information
Kellogg School of Management
Northwestern University
2211 Campus Drive
Evanston, IL 60208
Phone: 224-714-7035
ritwika.sen@kellogg.northwestern.edu
Education
Ph.D., Managerial Economics and Strategy, Northwestern University, 2024 (anticipated)
M.S. Managerial Economics & Strategy, Northwestern University, 2019
M.Sc. Economics, London School of Economics & Political Science, 2014
B.A. (Hons.) Economics, St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University, 2012
Fields of Specialization
Development Economics, Organizational Economics
Professional Experience
Country Economist, International Growth Centre, Uganda, 2016-2018
Lead Economist & Overseas Development Institute Fellow, Ministry of Agriculture and Animal Resources, Rwanda, 2014-2016
Independent Consultancies for: UNU WIDER (2017-18), Overseas Development Institute (2013-14)
Teaching Experience
Teaching Assistant, Northwestern University
– Business Analytics II (MBA), 2020-21
– Strategic Challenges in Emerging Markets (MBA), 2020-21
– Making Business Decisions with Big Data (MBA), 2020
– Statistical Decision Analysis (Executive MBA), 2020
Curriculum Vitae
Job Market Paper
“Supervision at Work: Evidence from a Field Experiment”
How does supervision impact worker performance? This paper examines the effects of frontline supervision on the speed and quality of production in a Ugandan data-collection firm. We conducted a field experiment, varying the timing and intensity of supervision among workers, to study the effects of supervision on worker performance. We find that, following increased supervision, workers demonstrate improvements in the dimensions of performance where they were initially weakest. These effects persist, even on days, tasks, and performance metrics that are not directly supervised. Our findings suggest that supervision facilitates targeted on-the-job coaching of workers, which results in economically meaningful improvements in their performance. This underscores the significance of supervisors as conduits for the transmission of tacit production knowledge within organizations.
Coverage: Economics that Really Matters (Cornell)
Other Research Papers
“Self-Employment Within the Firm” with V. Bassi. J.H. Lee, A. Peter, T. Porzio & E. Tugume
We collect time-use data for entrepreneurs and their workers in over 1,000 manufacturing firms in urban Uganda. We document limited labor specialization within the firm for establishments of all sizes and argue that this is likely due to the prevalence of product customization. We then develop a general equilibrium model of task assignment within the firm, estimate it with our data, and find large barriers to labor specialization. Our setting is close, in terms of aggregate productivity and firm scale, to an extreme benchmark in which each firm is just a collection of self-employed individuals sharing a production space. Given this internal organization of the firms, the benefits from alleviating other frictions that constrain firm growth are muted: the artisanal business model of most African firms is not easily scalable.
“Achieving Scale Collectively” with V. Bassi, R. Muoio, T. Porzio, and E. Tugume
Many firms in developing countries could be too small to adopt modern technology embodied in expensive production machines. This paper shows that rental market interactions allow these small firms to increase their effective scale and mechanize production. We conduct a survey of manufacturing firms in Uganda, which uncovers an active rental market for large machines between small firms in informal clusters. We then build an equilibrium model of firm behavior and estimate it with our data. We find that the rental market is quantitatively important for mechanization and productivity since it provides a workaround for other market imperfections that keep firms small. Overall, our results point to the importance of taking into account firm‐to‐firm interactions within informal clusters to understand technology adoption in low-income countries: focusing on the small scale of firms in isolation might be misleading.
Published. Econometrica, (2022) 90(6): 2937-2978. Coverage: Vox Dev, Microeconomic Insights
Work in Progress
“Seeding Innovation Through Reality TV“ with E. La Ferrara & C. Udry
Our project investigates whether an innovative approach to provide technical information, consisting of agri-edutainment (educational entertainment) programs broadcasted on national television, can help to meet the informational needs of farmers. Two key distinguishing features of TV programs are that (i) they can easily convey information also to populations with relatively low literacy levels, and (ii) they are easy to distribute at scale at low marginal cost compared to traditional extension services. TV may also be a particularly useful medium to mitigate gender gaps in access and effectiveness of traditional extension services, to the extent that TV viewership is less gender-imbalanced than access to other services. Prior market research in Kenya indicates that a “makeover style” reality television show focused on farming as business helped to boost farmer incomes at a cost of only $0.50 per viewer. We leverage the planned rollout of this television program to Uganda (in 2022/23) to measure the causal impact and cost-effectiveness of the show in diffusing recommended techniques, and to better understand the process of information transmission and learning in agriculture.
Fieldwork in progress.
References
Prof. Christopher Udry (Committee Co-Chair)
Prof. Michael Powell (Committee Co-Chair)
Prof. Lori Beaman
Prof. Ameet Morjaria