Gabriel Tourek is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Pittsburgh. His research focuses on the development of fiscal and state capacity and the equity of taxes and transfers in low-income countries. His research also explores what makes bureaucracies effective as well as market and behavioral frictions that constrain firms' decision-making and growth in emerging markets.
His work includes experiments evaluating the effectiveness of informal agents in tax collection, the complementarity of tax rates and enforcement in raising revenues, and the optimal assignment of tax collectors in the D.R. Congo, as well as an experiment with an online jobs platform in India measuring the impact of recruitment tools on hiring among small firms.
He works in the D.R. Congo, Rwanda, India, and Pakistan. He received his PhD from Harvard University and was a Post Doctoral Associate at the Jameel Poverty Action Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before his graduate studies, he worked at Innovations for Poverty Action and Evidence for Policy Design.