March 28, 2003 | Volume 31, Number 23

Christopher Udry appointed to Heinz chair

Christopher Udry, the newly named Henry J. Heinz II Professor of Economics, is one of the foremost American economists specializing in African development.

He is also director of Yale's Economic Growth Center, which is dedicated to understanding the economic development process within low-income countries, and how it is affected by trade and financial relations between developing and developed countries.

Udry's approach to economic research has been described as "a kind of economic anthropology" by Yale professor emeritus David Apter, who also held the Heinz chair. As a Yale Ph.D. student, Udry traveled to Zaria, Nigeria, where he conducted a year-long survey of individual households that resulted in his dissertation "Rural Credit in Nigeria." He has studied various aspects of Africa's agricultural financial markets — including the role of gender and social learning — as well as informal markets and resource management in African nations.

He is co-author of "Development Microeconomics" with Pranab Bardhan, and the two scholars co-edited the two-volume work "Readings in Development Micro-economics."

Udry's research has been supported by numerous grants from the National Science Foundation, as well as from the World Bank, the Institute for Policy Reform and the Pew Charitable Trusts, among others.

Udry earned a B.A. with high honors in 1981 from Swarthmore College and his Ph.D. from Yale in 1991.

He taught at Ghana Secondary School in Tamale, Ghana (1981-1983) and at Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria (1988-1989), where he was also a visiting research scholar. Udry served on the faculty of Northwestern University 1990-1998, and was a visiting senior research scholar at the University of Ghana's Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research 1996–1997. He came to Yale in 1998 as a professor in the Department of Economics. From 1999 to 2002, he chaired the Council on African Studies, part of the Yale Center for International and Area Studies. He was named director of the Economic Growth Center in 2000.

Udry has lectured widely at conferences and seminars throughout the world, and was an invited lecturer at the Winter Meetings of the American Economic Association in 1995. A charter member of the Northwestern Alumni Association Faculty First Circle, he was African Economic Research Consortium Resource Person 1994-1999. His academic research has been supported by fellowships and research grants from the National Science, Alfred P. Sloan and Fulbright-Hays foundations, among others.

He is a member of the editorial board for the Macmillan Press series on African Economies, and associate editor of the Journal of Development Economics, Econometrica and the Journal of African Economies.