Rate My Professor Andrew Dustan

Andrew Dustan is an Associate Professor of Economics at William & Mary, having joined the Department of Economics in the College of Arts and Sciences as an Assistant Professor in 2023 and receiving promotion in 2025. Prior to this, he held an Assistant Professor position in the Department of Economics at Vanderbilt University from 2014 to 2023. Dustan earned his Ph.D. in Agricultural and Resource Economics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2014, an M.A. in Economics from Miami University in 2008, and a B.A. in Economics and Spanish from the University of Oklahoma in 2007. His research centers on development economics, with a primary focus on the economics of education in Latin America, alongside interests in labor economics. He examines issues such as school choice mechanisms, gender disparities in STEM fields, the effects of conditional cash transfers on high school completion, and the influence of family networks and transportation infrastructure on educational outcomes.

Dustan's scholarship has been published in prominent journals including the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, Journal of Development Economics, Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Journal of Human Resources, and Economics of Education Review. Key publications include "Preferences, access, and the STEM gender gap in centralized high school assignment" with Diana K. L. Ngo (2024), "Motivating bureaucrats with behavioral insights when state capacity is weak: Evidence from large-scale field experiments in Peru" with Juan Manuel Hernández-Agramonte and Stanislao Maldonado (2023), "Second-order beliefs and gender" with Kristine Koutout and Greg Leo (2022), "Can large, untargeted conditional cash transfers decrease high school dropout? Evidence from Mexico City’s Prepa Sí" (2020), "Family networks and school choice" (2018), "Commuting to educational opportunity? School choice effects of mass transit expansion in Mexico City" with Diana K. L. Ngo (2018), and "Flourish or fail? The risky reward of elite high school admission in Mexico City" with Alain de Janvry and Elisabeth Sadoulet (2017). He has obtained significant research funding as Co-PI on grants from the National Science Foundation (SES-2214992, $414,029, 2022-2024), J-PAL Learning for All Initiative ($153,377, 2025), Spencer Foundation ($37,119, 2016), and others including Vanderbilt University and UC Berkeley awards. Dustan contributes to academic discourse through service on the program committee for the Development Economics in the South Workshop (2024, 2025), as co-organizer (2023), and on the Academic Committee of the Impact Evaluation Network, LACEA (2023).