Karla Hoff was Co-Director of the World Development Report 2015 on Mind, Society, and Behavior and a Senior Research Economist in the World Bank's Development Research Group until January 2020. She is a Visiting Professor of International and Public Affairs and Economics at Columbia University. Much of her work focuses on using the tools of economics to study social interactions. She has published papers in the American Economic Review that explain how segregation between renters and homeowners can create neighborhoods of highly unequal civic quality, how cueing social stigma impedes academic performance, and how Big Bang privatization in post-Soviet states impeded the emergence of the political demand for the rule of law. She won a Citation of Excellence for one of the top 50 papers from Emerald Management Review in 2009 for her paper with Joseph Stiglitz, “Exiting a Lawless State.” She was a member of the MacArthur Research Network on Inequality and Economic Performance, 1996–2006. She coedited The Economics of Rural Organization and Poverty Traps. In current work, she is evaluating in India the effect of a large-scale women’s empowerment project on the bias against women and a program of participatory theater. Her work spans conceptual analysis and grassroots fieldwork. She has a BA in French from Wellesley College and a PhD in economics from Princeton. She taught English in the Peace Corps in the Ivory Coast.