Rebecca Thornton is a Professor in the Department of Economicsics and affiliate faculty at the Building Inclusive Growth (BIG) Lab.
How did you get interested in development economics and research?
Rebecca Thornton: I was a German major in college and lived in Nepal right after graduating. During graduate school, I lived in Kenya and Malawi. These experiences fostered a deep love of learning local languages and immersing myself in new cultures and perspectives. Living in rural communities and learning directly from people there shaped my commitment to use research and data to amplify voices and help make a meaningful difference.
I was drawn to development economics out of a desire to use empirical research to provide rigorous evidence to policymakers and ultimately improve people’s well-being. Early in my career, I focused on low-income countries, where decisions around health, education, and family life have enormous impacts on individuals and communities. My research aims to inform both academic debates and real-world policy, with the greatest potential to impact governments, NGOs, and community organizations designing interventions that shape opportunities in resource-constrained settings.
Over time, my interests have broadened to include the deeper dimensions of human flourishing. I want to understand what truly contributes to purpose, fulfillment, and life satisfaction—and why financial resources and opportunities alone are not always enough. In this work, I am also committed to giving voice to a broader set of individuals who may not be traditionally viewed as vulnerable, but who nevertheless face barriers to well-being. This has led me to new questions that extend the economic lens: How do forgiveness, human suffering, and our own perspectives and beliefs shape choices and constrain welfare? Can we develop models that better capture these non-material drivers of well-being and, in turn, inform policies and practices that more effectively support human flourishing?
In your paper Some children left behind: Variation in the effects of an educational intervention, you look at literacy in children. Could you tell us how you identified that Uganda was the place you wanted to examine that in?
Sometimes research agendas are shaped by deliberate choice; at other times, they emerge from opportunity. While presenting at a workshop in Ghana, a participant approached me to describe what she believed to be a particularly promising learning intervention. Although I was initially skeptical, I agreed to collaborate in studying it.
Our subsequent work suggests that the intervention has produced unusually large and persistent effects relative to those typically found in the literature. Much of the success of the project, I believe, is that it was designed and developed by Ugandan practitioners in northern Uganda. This initial project has formed the basis for long-term collaboration and a number of research papers.
How was it working on your research on early grade reading project and some of the challenges of running a longitudinal experiment within the project?
One challenge is that we began the project when children were in first grade. We tried to collect standardized measurements of reading among these first graders, and we did that badly. Many of the children had never used pencil before, and did not have experience with written text. When we tested the children at the beginning of first grade, 85-90% could recognize zero letters. We should have collected data on more basic pre-school level skills. We are now trying to track these same children over time. This is a setting where cell phones ownership is still limited, a post-Civil War area with a lot of mobility, and it's a really rural agricultural area, so that it is a challenge to find people. COVID also was a challenge. Uganda was closed for 2 whole years, and this has impacted how we track children and how we interpret our results.
More broadly, how do you see your work affecting people's lives or policy?
For this Uganda study, one of the main findings is that our results on improving children’s reading skills are quite large, about ten times the average effect size typically observed in other randomized studies. The intervention achieved this simply by supporting regular classroom teachers. There wasn’t an increase in pay, punitive measures, or changes in monitoring. Instead, the program focused on providing teachers with the tools and support they needed to be effective. With additional support, teachers were able to generate substantial improvements in early literacy, and these effects have persisted for approximately eight years. We are continuing to follow the cohort of students to understand longer term impacts of learning how to read.
I think our results have important implications for how we think about education policy: rather than focusing on punitive approaches such as monitoring or dismissal, investing in teacher support can yield meaningful and lasting gains, even without increasing compensation.
A second important aspect of this study is that the intervention was delivered in students’ mother tongue. Children received instruction in their home language and then transitioned to English in the fourth grade. Although the intervention itself was entirely in the mother tongue, we find that the benefits extend to English literacy as well. This speaks directly to ongoing debates about whether children should first learn to read in English or in their home language. Our results suggest that strengthening literacy in the mother tongue does not crowd out English acquisition; in fact, it appears to support it. This is an additional finding that could inform, or at least lend support to, mother-tongue-first language policies.
What is one of the most memorable episodes from your research in the field that has shaped your perspective on your work?
I think my perspective on research ethics has been shaped by experiences early in my career, when I underestimated the impact that researchers can have simply through the process of data collection. Two studies in particular made me realize that we don’t always fully internalize how our presence and our methods can affect people’s lives.
In one study on adult male circumcision, we interviewed men about their beliefs related to HIV prevention and collected information about their partners. A year later, after receiving additional funding, we returned to interview those partners, whose names we had recorded during the initial survey. All of this had received ethical approval, and we were transparent about our plans. However, over the course of the year, some partnerships had changed. In some cases, individuals were now married to someone else. When our team approached women and asked for them by name—for example, “Are you Mary?”—we inadvertently revealed information about past relationships, including infidelity. No one had fully anticipated that simply referencing a name from a prior survey could create tension or conflict within a household.
In another study, we offered financial incentives, up to roughly three months’ wages, for individuals who remained HIV negative over the course of a year. We collected detailed behavioral data to assess whether the incentive changed sexual behavior. We found no evidence of behavioral change during the intervention period. However, when we followed up one week after distributing the reward, we found that the male recipients in our study had engaged in significantly more unsafe sex. In this case, the research intervention itself appears to have had unintended negative consequences.
Together, these experiences underscored that researchers are not always neutral actors in the environments they study.
My early work in learning local languages and field-testing survey instruments has given me a strong appreciation for how question wording influences responses. I now incorporate this into my teaching, emphasizing how survey design can shape reported behavior.
What research, be it new areas or new projects, are you looking forward to? Any new projects in the plans?
My work in Uganda increased my interest in mother-tongue instruction. The project in Uganda demonstrated the powerful impact of learning mother-tongue reading first. I hypothesized that exposure to mother-tongue text could have lasting positive impacts on literacy. To test this, I worked with co-authors to document how exposure to mother-tongue translations to the Bible may have affected educational attainment and literacy. In many cases, an early Bible translation represented the first time a language had been systematically transcribed into text. We compiled data on the timing of first Bible translations into African languages and linked this information with adult literacy outcomes, comparing those who would have been exposed to in primary school years to the mother-tongue Bible translation with those who were too old to benefit from the translation. We find large effects of the translations on associated with higher levels of adult literacy and educational attainment.
So far, we are finding substantial effects that are similar across men and women, as well as across Muslims and Christians, suggesting that Bible translations may have had long-term impacts on literacy that extend beyond religious affiliation. Our next step is to extend this analysis to other parts of the world to examine whether similar patterns emerge in other contexts.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. It was conducted as part of a series of faculty profiles on BIG Lab Affiliated Faculty coming out this spring. Stay up to date with the BIG Lab by following us on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Bluesky.