Aine Seitz McCarthy

Aine McCarthy joined the Economics Department at Lewis & Clark in 2016. She completed her PhD in applied economics at University of Minnesota. 

Professor McCarthy’s work focuses on the microeconomics of poverty alleviation: health, education and women’s empowerment. She uses experimental methods and econometric analysis to address policy-relevant research questions. Her research has been published in top development economics journals including World Development, Agricultural Economics and Journal of Development Studies. Professor McCarthy has conducted extensive fieldwork in East Africa, including collaborating with district health officials to design and implement a randomized control trial in the Simiyu region of Tanzania. Her work has been funded by the European Union, Gates Foundation, International Livestock Research Institute, and Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab.

During graduate school in Minnesota, she worked in data infrastructure on the IPUMS-International project. Prior to that, she worked in policy research at the RAND Corporation and majored in mathematics (and hiking in the Maine woods) at Colby College.

Specialty

Economic Development, Health Economics, Applied Microeconomics, Demography, Econometrics

Teaching

ECON 100: Principles of Economics

ECON 232: Economic Development

ECON 303: Econometrics

ECON 399: Global Health Economics

ECON 433: Senior Seminar

Research

Working Papers

“Age and Agency: The Impact of an Agriculture and Credit Program on Women’s Empowerment in Pastoralist Tanzania” (with Brooke L. Krause)

“Sierra Leone Sees to Learn: Measuring the Effect of Vision Care on Education”  (with Paul Glewwe, Lindsey K. Novak, Brooke Krause, Jalikatu Mustapha, Nathan Congdon)

       * Funding awarded by USAID’s Development Innovation Ventures.

Peer-Reviewed Publications

Aine Seitz McCarthy and Rachel Pearlman.*** “Multiplying Siblings: The Trade-off Between Family Size and Child Education Quality in Rural Bangladesh” Journal of Development Studies 58, no 9 (2022):1831-1856 [LINK] [Final Manuscript ]

Davila, Rodrigo Lovaton, Aine Seitz McCarthy, Dorothy Gondwe, Phatta Kirdruang, and Uttam Sharma. “Water, walls, and bicycles: wealth index composition using census microdata.” Journal of Demographic Economics 88.1 (2022): 79-120. [LINK]

Damon, Amy L., Aine Seitz McCarthy “Partnerships and production: Agriculture and polygyny in Tanzanian households” Agricultural Economics 50(2019): 527–542. [LINK] 

McCarthy, Aine Seitz. “Intimate partner violence and family planning decisions: Experimental evidence from rural Tanzania.” World Development 114 (2019): 156-174.[LINK]

       Featured on the World Bank’s Development Impact blog

Krause, Brooke L., Aine Seitz McCarthy, and David Chapman. “Fuelling financial literacy: estimating the impact of youth entrepreneurship training in Tanzania.” Journal of Development Effectiveness 8.2 (2016): 234-256.  [LINK]

Professional Publications

Charles Nemfakos, Irv Blickstein, Aine Seitz McCarthy and Jerry M. Sollinger. The Perfect Storm: The Goldwater-Nichols Act and Its Effect on Navy Acquisition. RAND Occasional Paper 308-NAVY. Santa Monica, CA: RAND 2010. [LINK]
 
Harry J. Thie, Margaret C. Harrell, Aine Seitz McCarthy, and Joseph Jenkins. Consolidated Afloat Networks and Enterprise Services (CANES): Manpower, Personnel and Training Implications. RAND Monograph 896-NAVY. Santa Monica, CA: RAND 2009. [LINK]

Works in Progress

“Student-Centered Pedagogy and Chidren’s Non-Cognitive Skills in Rural Tanzanian Schools” (with Lindsey K. Novak and Paul Glewwe)

“His and Her Fertility Preferences: Spousal Differences in the Demand for Children” (with Catalina Herrera Almanza)

*** Lewis & Clark College student co-author