Project Dawn
Women Leading Resilience in Chepang Communities, Nepal
This study examines the long-term impacts of a women’s empowerment program implemented in 2015–2016 among Indigenous Chepang communities in Chitwan, Nepal. It explores how strengthening women’s leadership and governance participation influences community resilience, adaptive capacity, and inclusive local governance nearly a decade later.
By comparing communities that received empowerment training with those that did not, the project uncovers how sustained women’s leadership can drive social transformation, improve climate adaptation, and shift gender norms. The findings aim to inform future gender-responsive, equity-driven adaptation strategies grounded in Indigenous knowledge and lived experience.
Community-Led Climate Justice and Carbon Credits in Kenya
This participatory action research project centers Indigenous peoples, pastoralists, and smallholder farmers affected by carbon credit initiatives in Kenya. It documents how these projects impact community land rights, livelihoods, and cultural practices, while addressing gaps between promised benefits and lived realities.
By combining community-driven mapping, surveys, and storytelling, the project aims to build transparency, accountability, and equitable benefit-sharing in Kenya’s rapidly growing carbon markets. Phase 1 establishes a foundation of evidence and priorities to co-create solutions that protect rights and advance climate justice. Future phases will expand spatial analysis, financial tracking, and policy advocacy led by the communities themselves.
Evaluating Socioeconomic Impact of Community-Based Social Enterprises in Indonesia
This study assesses the long-term effects of Bina Swadaya’s community-based social enterprises on rural households in Indonesia. It examines how programs focused on microfinance, agribusiness, eco-tourism, and skills training contribute to income stability, livelihood diversification, social cohesion, gender empowerment, and local governance participation.
Using rigorous mixed methods, including comparative surveys and qualitative research, the project generates actionable evidence to guide policy and program design. The goal is to inform scalable, inclusive models that empower marginalized rural communities and promote sustainable development in Indonesia and beyond.
Project Ascend
Fiscal Policy Uncertainty and Financial Frictions
The project examines how volatility in fiscal policy, such as unpredictable changes in government spending or taxation, affects macroeconomic performance and financial stability. The project is grounded in a modern theoretical framework that incorporates frictions in money and credit markets, allowing it to capture how fiscal uncertainty distorts liquidity, credit flows, and real economic activity. By modeling fiscal volatility as time-varying and persistent, the project provides new insight into how uncertainty itself, not just policy direction, can shape expectations, amplify downturns, and interact with financial intermediaries to propagate shocks throughout the economy.
The project combines theoretical modeling with empirical analysis. The first component develops a dynamic economic model that integrates fiscal uncertainty into a New Monetarist setting with a financial sector, enabling exploration of how credit conditions and monetary transmission are affected. The second component uses data from the U.S. and international economies to quantify the macro-financial consequences of fiscal uncertainty shocks. Together, these efforts aim to inform policy debates on fiscal discipline, debt management, and macroeconomic stabilization by shedding light on the often-overlooked costs of unpredictable government behavior.
Project Echo
Quantifying the Economic Impacts of Decentralized Finance
The research project investigates how decentralized finance (DeFi) is reshaping the structure and function of modern financial systems, particularly in economies with limited access to traditional banking. Using a New Monetarist framework, the project builds a theoretical model in which DeFi tokens, digital assets used in peer-to-peer financial transactions, emerge as alternatives or complements to fiat money. The model captures key features of DeFi, including decentralized exchanges, smart contracts, and matching frictions in decentralized markets. By integrating DeFi into a rigorous monetary theory framework, the project aims to better understand how these technologies affect liquidity, market efficiency, financial inclusion, and the transmission of monetary policy.
The research agenda includes both theoretical and empirical components. The theoretical work focuses on the conditions under which DeFi can improve welfare, increase market participation, or create new forms of systemic risk. Empirical studies examine real-world patterns of DeFi adoption, the stability and use of stablecoins, the performance of DeFi during liquidity shocks, and the spillover effects on traditional financial markets and policy effectiveness. Together, these components provide a clearer picture of how decentralized technologies are altering the financial landscape and what this means for economic policy, regulation, and development strategies in both advanced and emerging economies.