Erica Field

Erica M. Field is a Professor of Economics and Global Health at Duke University. She is also a Fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research, an affiliate of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), and a member of the Jameel Poverty Action Lab at MIT. She was the 2010 recipient of the Elaine Bennett Research Prize.

Field studied Economics and Latin American Studies at Vassar College, graduating in 1996. As a Fulbright scholar, she then studied the impact of government programs in Peru on that country's labor force, before returning to school at Princeton University, where she completed her PhD in 2003. Her work in Peru deepened her interest in health research. Her PhD thesis research, examining the impact of land-title reform on labor supply in Peru, was described in the New York Times.

Her research focuses on property rights and housing policy; health and development; marriage and family law; and financial markets for the poor. She has shown that daughters of women given iodine supplementation during pregnancy perform substantially better in school. She has also shown that top law students given tuition grants were much more likely to take positions in the public sector than students who were instead given loans than would be forgiven if they took positions in the public sector.