Christopher Blattman is a Canadian-American economist and political scientist working on conflict, crime, and international development.
[4][5][6] Blattman is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a non-resident fellow with the Center for Global Development,[7] and a Board Member and academic lead of the Crime and Violence Section of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab.
[10] Blattman has used field experiments to argue that poor and unemployed young people in low-income countries tend to invest cash in small enterprises and thus raise their incomes.
He advocated for cash transfers to the poor in a 2014 op-ed in The New York Times[11] as well as a 2014 Foreign Affairs magazine article.
[16] Together with economist Stefan Dercon, Blattman ran a randomized controlled trial in Ethiopia that investigated the impact of low-skill industrial jobs.