Welcome

Joseph Levine.

Welcome to my website! I am a second-year PhD student in the Department of Economics at the University of Oxford.My program is the ''Integrated DPhil (2+2) in economics,'' because Oxford just has to be special 🙄. My class, starting in 2022, is the second class admitted to this program, which Oxford advertises as ''similar to that of the integrated five-year PhD ... at leading economics graduate schools worldwide.'' I'm just going to keep calling it a PhD until someone yells at me. Before coming to Oxford, I worked on forecasting at the Global Priorities Institute, drove ambulances in Maryland, and wrote bad code for the IRS. I also worked in the space industry for three years.I worked as an aerospace economist for Bryce Space and Technology, where I researched telecommunications satellites, earth observation satellites, and rockets. I really like getting email. I also really like talking to people.

Currently, I research development, public, and agricultural economics. I've been lucky to do this research from very interesting places. I'm a co-PI on an RCT in The Gambia on public service provision and property taxation. For all of 2021, I lived in Sierra Leone, helping to design and implement research programs on energy and health economics. I worked with Prof. S.P. Harish and his teams in Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh in 2018. Research on rural electrification also brought me to Afghanistan several times between 2018-2020
Thanks to my friends and colleagues at Team Afghan Power, there is a solar field in Afghanistan named after me.
. My masters thesis is on development meta-science, using data from the AEA RCT Registry.

Some people, on their websites, spell out their emails like jablevine at gmail dot com. I don't understand why this is common, but I really like getting email and this introduces more friction into the already hard process of sending someone a cold email. Please send me an email to jablevine@gmail.com explaining this. Or, I might get a torrent of spam email proving why people don't do what I'm doing.

You can also give me anonymous feedback here. Anything is useful and appreciated, especially feedback which is specific ("You use the word heteroscedastic too much.") and timely ("You should move out of the way of that speeding trolley.").

Welcome - Joseph Levine