Bilal Zia

Bilal Zia is a Senior Economist in the Finance and Private Sector Development Team of the Development Research Group at the World Bank in Washington DC and an adjunct lecturer in the International Economics program at Johns Hopkins SAIS. His research is focused on financial development at the household, firm, and bank levels, and his work has appeared in top academic journals such as the Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, Management Science, and Journal of Development Economics. He uses both experimental and non-experimental methods and some of his recent work includes rigorous impact evaluations of financial and business education programs, testing innovative methods to improve financial access for households and firms, and applying insights from behavioral economics to development finance. Professor Zia holds a PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.