Tihtina Zenebe Gebre

This profile was current as of 2015, when she was part of the on-campus Kellogg community.

My name is Tihtina Zenebe Gebre and I am a fifth year PhD student in the Economics Department. I hold a Bachelor of Science in Applied Mathematics-Economics and a Bachelor of Arts in Visual Arts from Brown University. I have also received a Master of Arts degree in Economics from University of Notre Dame. In my PhD program, I specialize in Development Economics with a focus on the fields of Labor and Education Economics.

My dissertation investigates the effects of education policy reforms in developing countries on educational attainment as well as later-in-life outcomes including labor market, agricultural and health outcomes. More specifically, I consider two reforms; (1) the adoption of mother tongue education in Ethiopia (2) the introduction of free primary education in Malawi in the early 1990s. In each of these cases, I combine differences across-regions in the intensity of the reforms with differences across cohorts induced by the timing of the reforms, in order to estimate the causal impacts of the reforms on short-term and long-term outcomes, isolated from other secular trends. When I am not working on my research I like to draw and paint, even though that hasn't happened in a while.