Harounan Kazianga is the Carson Priority Excellence in Business Administration Professor of Economics in the department of economics in the Spears School of Business at Oklahoma State University. He was also an associate professor of economics from 2014 to 2017 and an assistant professor from 2008 to 2013 at Oklahoma State University. Before joining Oklahoma State University, he had been a postdoctoral fellow at the Economic Growth Center at Yale University, at the Earth Institute at Columbia University, and a consultant at the World Bank.  Dr.  Kazianga holds a PhD from Purdue University and a master’s and undergraduate degree in economics from the University of Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso. 

His research interest is in development, with a particular focus on rural economic activity in Sub-Saharan Africa. He leverages on large scale field work to investigate technological change in agriculture, the use of financial markets, asset accumulation, and gift exchange to cope with risk, gender relations, and the structure of household economies, property rights and a variety of other aspects of rural economic organization.  His research has appeared in the American Economic Journal, Applied, the Journal of Development Economics, the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Economic Development and Cultural Change and World Development, among others.