Anne Karing became a Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in 2021. Her research focuses on the economics of healthcare delivery and health-seeking behaviors in low-income countries, applying insights from psychology. Her core work examines how social signaling motives can change behaviors in ways that benefit individual health and society. Karing has implemented large-scale field experiments that examine the effectiveness of social signaling incentives in increasing the demand for childhood immunization and deworming treatment in Sierra Leone and Kenya. As part of this research, she is following up with different cohorts and health care providers to assess the persistent impacts of these incentives and their general equilibrium effects. Recently, Karing has started a research agenda into the markets of medicines, including formal but also illegal markets, and how these interact. She is currently studying the economic and psychological factors that contribute to the persistence of informal markets for low-quality medicines, as well as the relevance of altruistic preferences and competition in taming market failures among formal providers. She is also examining the efficacy of different government policies to increase the take-up of the COVID-19 vaccine, including common mandates but also strategies to combat misinformation and rumors.
Karing earned a BA with honors in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics as well as an MPhil in Economics from the University of Oxford, where she also received a Rhodes Scholarship. She completed a PhD in Economics at University of California, Berkeley. Most recently she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Department of Economics and the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University.