Economics of Nonprofit Organizations
Taught by Dean Karlan & Shannon Coyne
Department of Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences, Economics

Dean Karlan is the Frederic Esser Nemmers Distinguished Professor of Economics and Finance at Northwestern University, co-Director with Christopher Udry of the Global Poverty Research Lab at Northwestern University, and the Founder and President of Innovations for Poverty Action, a non-profit organization dedicated to discovering and promoting solutions to global poverty problems. Karlan is also on the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors of the M.I.T. Jameel Poverty Action Lab. 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, typically employing experimental methodologies and behavioral economics insights to examine what works, what does not, and why to address social problems. His work spans many geographies and topics, including sustainable income generation for those in abject poverty, credit and savings markets for low income households, agriculture for smallholder farmers, small and medium entrepreneurship and smoking cessation, and charitable giving. He has worked in over twenty countries around the world, including both low income countries and also the United States.

Karlan received a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He was awarded distinguished alumni awards from the University of Chicago Booth Graduate School of Business and the Duke University Talent Identification Program.

Shannon Coyne is Senior Manager for Effective Philanthropy at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. In this role, Shannon leads research and teaching on effective philanthropy in collaboration with Professor Dean Karlan. She has nearly a decade of experience in global development, nonprofit management, and monitoring and evaluation. Shannon is passionate about helping donors understand nonprofit impact and helping mission-driven organizations to better track, estimate, and communicate their impact. She has a B.A. from the University of Notre Dame and a Master’s degree from The Fletcher School at Tufts University.