As the Watson School launched early this summer, its Master of Public Affairs (MPA) program welcomed a new class of students. This year's cohort brings with them a wide array of experiences and perspectives that have shaped their goals as they enter the program.
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Bryce Millett Steinberg
IJC Assistant Professor of Economics and International and Public Affairs
111 Thayer Street, Room 225
Research Interests
Children & Families, Education, Gender, Global Health, Health & Welfare, Inequality & Poverty
Areas of Interest
Education, Child Labor, Tertiary Education in Africa, Contraceptive Adoption
Biography
Bryce Steinberg is the IJC Assistant Professor of Economics and International and Public Affairs at Brown University. She joined Brown in 2015 as a postdoctoral fellow and has been on the faculty since 2017. She is a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Research Affiliate at the Center for Economic Policy Research. Her research has been supported by more than $1.3 million in funding, including grants from the National Science Foundation, J-PAL, the International Growth Centre, and the Center for Effective Global Action. At Brown she teaches microeconomics and development economics across the MPA, undergraduate, and Ph.D. programs, and beginning in July 2026 will serve as Faculty Director of the MPA program. She holds a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University and her A.B. in economics (with honors) from Brown University in 2009.
Research
Bryce Steinberg is a development economist who studies what shapes families' and individuals' investment in education and health in low-income countries. In a series of papers on rural India, she shows that parents respond sharply to the changing economic value of their children's time, so that rising wages can pull children out of school even as family incomes grow — with sometimes counterintuitive consequences for anti-poverty policy. Her more recent work follows female university students in Sub-Saharan Africa, a population long assumed to be elite but in fact living close to subsistence. Through randomized trials in Zambia, she finds that modest financial assistance not only improves academic outcomes but reshapes students' health and sexual behavior, cutting risky exposure and unwanted pregnancy. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, J-PAL, and others, and published in leading economics journals including the Journal of Political Economy.
Publications
Sex and Subsistence: The Unexpected Benefits of Financial Aid in Sub-Saharan Africa (with Natalie Bau and Corinne Low) — working paper
The Precarious Economic Lives of College Students in Sub-Saharan Africa (with Natalie Bau, Corinne Low, and Simona Simona) — submitted
Family Planning, Now and Later: Infertility Fear and Contraception Take-Up (with Natalie Bau, Corinne Low, and David Henning) — R&R, Review of Economic Studies
Human Capital in the Presence of Child Labor (with Natalie Bau, Martin Rotemberg, and Manisha Shah) — R&R (resubmitted), JPE: Micro
Water, Health and Wealth: The Impact of Piped Water Outages on Disease Prevalence and Financial Transactions in Zambia, Economica 88: 755–781 (2021) (with Nava Ashraf, Ed Glaeser, and Abraham Holland)
Workfare and Human Capital: Evidence from India, Journal of Human Resources 56(2): 380–405 (2021) (with Manisha Shah)
Drought of Opportunities: Contemporaneous and Long-Term Impacts of Rainfall Shocks on Human Capital, Journal of Political Economy 125(2): 527–561 (2017) (with Manisha Shah)
Teaching
ECON 510
MPA 2460
Econ 2510
Recent News
This year, five Watson research proposals were awarded a total of $100,000 in Birkelund Funds. The funds support faculty research, especially in the early stages, and encourage student engagement in research.
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The Watson Institute awarded Birkelund funds to five faculty research projects during the 2023 - 2024 academic year. Projects ranged from studying civilian-military coordination during the pandemic to creating a study group between Brown students and faculty, and quilombola communities in Brazil.
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This year six Watson research proposals were awarded a total of $121,486 in Birkelund Funds. The funds are used to support faculty research — especially in the early stages — and to encourage student engagement in research.
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Bryce Steinberg ’09 is the IJC Assistant Professor Economics at the Watson Institute at Brown University. She focuses her research on education and health in the developing world. After earning her Ph.D. in economics from Harvard, she served as a postdoctoral fellow at the Watson Institute.
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A study co-authored by Bryce Millett Steinberg found India's monsoon season may not be a boon for everyone. The study suggests that with torrential rains, school children are often stuck at home and turned into farmers.
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