Willa Helterline Friedman
Willa Friedman is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Houston. Her research spans the areas of development economics, health economics, political economy, and behavioral economics. Before joining the University of Houston, she was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Global Development in Washington, DC. She received her PhD in economics at UC Berkeley and a BA in social studies at Harvard. She has published research on risk-taking in the context of HIV and variation in treatment availability, corruption and health service provision, marketing preventive health behaviors to men, and other topics. Her ongoing research projects involve studying the allocation of workers in a government youth service program in Kenya, the effects of barriers to facility-based childbirths in Kenya and Ghana, differences in attitudes towards intimate partner violence between parents of sons and parents of daughters in the US and West Africa, and how racial bias shows up differently in the assessment of good and bad behavior through an online experiment in the US. She has spent time working and studying in Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, Burkina Faso, Rwanda, Cambodia, Mali, Tanzania, and Uganda.