Executive Director and Co-Founder

Jonathan is Professor of Public Policy and Economics at NYU Wagner. His research focuses on finance, poverty, and inequality.

Jonathan is the co-author of The Financial Diaries: How American Families Cope in a World of Uncertainty (Princeton 2017) with Rachel Schneider, which reports on the financial lives of 235 working Americans over the course of a year. He also co-authored Portfolios of the Poor: How the World’s Poor Live on $2 a Day (Princeton 2009) and The Economics of Microfinance (MIT Press 2010). He is co-editor of Banking the World: Empirical Foundations of Financial Inclusion (MIT Press). With Dean Karlan, Morduch has written an empirically-oriented principles of economics text, Economics (McGraw-Hill 2017, 2nd ed.).

Jonathan has taught on the Economics faculty at Harvard, and has held visiting positions at Stanford, Princeton, Hitotsubashi University and the University of Tokyo. He holds a BA from Brown University and Ph.D. from Harvard University, both in Economics. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Université Libre de Bruxelles in December 2008 in recognition of his work on microfinance.