Natalia Rigol is currently a visiting scholar at EPoD (based at the Harvard Kennedy School) and a Bell Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Harvard Population and Development Center (based at the Harvard School of Public Health). She received her Ph.D. in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2016. Her research focuses primarily on how to design, target, and deliver financial products to the poor, and, in particular, how financial inclusion can improve the socio-economic position of women. Her projects have analyzed how the design and delivery of microfinance products can enhance business growth; how to utilize mechanism design to elicit and aggregate community information to target high-growth entrepreneurs; the importance of peer support in conjunction with financial training in helping women grow their enterprise; and, the value of financial inclusion for improving female labor force participation. She has also tested behavioral models to increase hand washing behavior and habituation. Her ongoing work includes studying the interaction between financial inclusion and corruption; the role of intra-household bargaining in resource allocation decisions among entrepreneurs in the household; and, the effect of caste norms on female labor force participation.
