Dean Karlan is the Frederic Esser Nemmers Distinguished Professor of Economics and Finance at Northwestern University, co-Director with Nancy Qian and Christopher Udry of the Global Poverty Research Lab at Northwestern University, former Chief Economist of USAID (2022-2025), and the Founder of Innovations for Poverty Action , a non-profit organization dedicated to discovering and promoting solutions to global poverty problems. Karlan was also on the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors of the M.I.T. Jameel Poverty Action Lab from inception until 2022. In 2015, he also co-founded ImpactMatters, a nonprofit dedicated to estimating and rating impact of nonprofit organizations in order to help donors choose good charities and to promote more transparency in the nonprofit sector.

His research focuses on microeconomic issues of poverty, specifically employing experimental methodologies to examine what works, what does not, and why. He focuses on microfinance program design internationally, and voting and charitable giving decisions domestically. In microfinance, he has studied interest rate policy, credit evaluation and scoring policies, entrepreneurship training, group versus individual liability, savings product design, credit with education, and impact from increased access to credit. His work on savings typically uses insights from psychology and behavioural economics to design and test specialised products.

He has consulted for the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, FINCA International and the Guatemalan government. His articles have been published in the American Economic Review, the Journal of the European Economic Association, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Economic Journal. Recently his work received coverage in The New York Times, The Economist, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and the Financial Times. Karlan received a Ph.D. in Economics from M.I.T., an M.B.A . and an M.P.P. from the University of Chicago, and a B.A. in International Affairs from the University of Virginia.