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Ahmed Elsayed

  • Position: Associate Professor and Executive Director of J-PAL MENA
  • Department: JPAL-MENA
Brief Biography

Ahmed Elsayed is an associate professor at the Onsi Sawiris School of Business and the executive director of J-PAL Middle East and North Africa (MENA). In this capacity, he plays a crucial role in J-PAL MENA's operations by providing strategic and technical oversight to research, policy outreach, and capacity-building activities. His role involves guiding the strategic direction and growth of the organization and cultivating partnerships with innovative policymakers across the MENA region to foster evidence generation and usage.

Prior to joining The American University in Cairo (AUC) and J-PAL in 2022, Elsayed spent eight years as a senior researcher at the IZA- Institute of Labor Economics in Bonn, Germany, where he acted as the deputy program director of the research program Gender, Growth, and Labor Markets in Low-Income Countries (G²LM|LIC), a joint initiative between the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) in the UK government and IZA in Germany aiming at building scientific evidence on the labor market and gender issues in the developing world.

Elsayed is currently a Research Fellow at IZA, the Research Centre for Education and the Labour Market (ROA) in the Netherlands, and the Economic Research Forum (ERF) in Egypt. His main research interests are in development economics, applied micro-econometrics, migration, and labor economics. He is particularly interested in the intersection between research and policy in the area of development.

He received his MSc in business research and PhD in Economics from the Maastricht University School of Business and Economics in the Netherlands.

Books

Data Sets

Journal Articles

Working Papers

Book Chapters and Policy Reports

  • Labour Market Effects of COVID-19 in Developing Countries and Policy Response, (with O. Bandiera), G2LM|LIC Synthesis Paper 12, May 2021
  • The Global Jobs Database: A New Dataset on Labour Markets of Developing Countries, (with O. Bandiera), G2LM|LIC Policy Brief 41, May 2021
  • Covid19 and the Labor Markets: Lessons, Challenges, and Opportunities. Al-Ahram Democracy (in Arabic), 79, 55-60. July 2020
  • Housing and Living Conditions in Jordan, in The Jordanian Labor Market Between Fragility and Resilience, Caroline Krafft and Ragui Assaad (Eds.) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.
  • Informality during Political Turmoil: Evidence from the Arab Spring (with J. Wahba), The Forum Policy Portal, Feb. 2018
  • Empowering Young Women through Business and Vocational Training: Evidence from Rural Upper Egypt (with R. Roushdy), IFAD/ILO Impact Brief Series 10, 2018.
  • Policy report on Behavioral Economics and Saudization for the World Bank and Ministry of Labor of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, (with J. Feld), March 2012