Esteban J. Quiñones

Esteban J. Quiñones is a development economist and demographer with research interests in rural development, migration, food security, agriculture, social protection, climate change, gender, and labor economics.

Quiñones designs and implements experimental and quasi-experimental evaluations, along with observational assessments of social programs, agricultural interventions, and migration. For example, his research explores anticipatory migration associated with climate change in Mexico, specifically in response to observing agricultural production shocks among surrounding households due to extreme heat spells. He has also studied the influence of extreme droughts on risk attitudes and migration decisions in Thailand and Vietnam. In other recent studies, Quiñones investigated the influence of migration and return migration on occupation outcomes for southern Mexicans, and the persistence of poverty shaped by long-run asset accumulation dynamics in northern Nigeria. His experience also includes conducting research and working with policymakers in Burkina Faso, Ghana, Mozambique, Uganda, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Tajikistan.

At Mathematica, Quiñones has served as an evaluator for the Advancing Local Dairy Development Program in Nigeria, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation; the Millennium Challenge Corporation’s Niger Irrigation and Market Access Project in Niger and the Irrigation and Water Resource Management Project in Senegal, as well as the Lecture Pour Tous early grade reading program in Senegal, supported by the United States Agency for International Development.

Quiñones has presented research at annual conferences of the Association of Public Policy Analysis and Management, the Centre for the Study of African Economies, and the Population Association of America; and at the North East Universities Development Consortium Conference, the Midwest International Economic Development Conference, the International Union of Scientific Study of Population’s Population, Poverty and Inequality Conference, and the Sustainability and Development Conference. His work has been published in World Development, Food Policy, Population and Environment, Policy in Focus, and the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, and he has served as a reviewer for World Development, Demography, the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, the Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, the Journal of Development Studies, the Journal of Development Effectiveness, Population & Environment, the Journal of Behavioral & Experimental Economics, International Migration Review, Migration Studies, Feminist Economics, Agricultural Economics, and Economics that Really Matters.

Before embarking on his doctoral studies, he worked at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, DC, and the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations in Rome, Italy; he also served with the AmeriCorps National Civilian Community Corps. He holds a Ph.D. in agricultural and applied economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was a predoctoral trainee at the Center for Demography and Ecology supported by the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development (NICHD-T32). He also holds an M.A. in international development from the School of International Service at American University and a B.A. in economics from Tufts University.