Obsessing Over Numbers

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By PIPER FOGG

The budding economist Benjamin A. Olken sees life as one big puzzle to solve.

For instance, at a Seder a few years ago, Mr. Olken set out to test whether a Passover story his father had told was correct. According to the story, there were initially only 70 Jews in Egypt, but 400 years later, at the time of Exodus, there were 600,000.

Was that growth rate reasonable, he wanted to know, or did the Bible get it wrong? His family waited while he worked it out. Mr. Olken says that he assumed 25 years per generation, which would add up to 16 generations, implying a population growth of 76 percent per generation, or between 3 and 4 children per woman. Only after he was satisfied that the figures were "in the right ballpark" did his family return to their matzo and wine.

After getting engaged two years ago, Mr. Olken, 30, analyzed the number of wedding-related e-mail messages he received. He went so far as to create a pie chart showing who sent the most. The answer? His future mother-in-law.

An insatiable curiosity and passion for investigation have propelled Mr. Olken far. He attended Yale University, where he graduated summa cum laude in 1997 with a joint degree in mathematics and ethics, politics, and economics. After receiving his Ph.D. in economics last summer from Harvard University, he spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

On the job market in the fall, his credentials, which include several published papers in reputable journals and a half-million-dollar research project in Indonesia, earned him interviews at some of the best economics departments in the country, including the University of Chicago, Stanford University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Mr. Olken turned down tenure-track offers from the latter two to stay in Cambridge, where he will join the Harvard Society of Fellows. The program will allow him to concentrate solely on research for the next three years. Only a handful of economists have been accepted over the last two decades into the program, which takes applications from scholars in all disciplines and accepts about 10 new fellows each year.

His wife and fellow economist, Amy N. Finkelstein -- whom he met at the "National Bureau of Economic Romance," as their professors have dubbed it -- is also a junior fellow at Harvard.

"Ben is one of the most exciting young scholars in economics," says Lawrence F. Katz, a professor of economics and one his advisers at Harvard. "He's both creative and smart and incredibly entrepreneurial."

Studying Corruption

A case in point is the field study in Indonesia that Mr. Olken designed, planned, and ran as a graduate student. The project was no small affair. Mr. Olken, who had won a $550,000 grant from the World Bank, hired 70 people to help him administer his study in more than 600 villages throughout Central and East Java. Each village was already poised to participate in a nationwide community-development project, in which the government paid local workers to pave dirt roads with rock and gravel.

Mr. Olken had learned from his previous travels in Indonesia, where he spent a year on a Henry Luce Foundation fellowship after college, that corruption was a serious problem in the archipelago. He set out to discover if there were ways to effectively minimize corruption, such as theft of materials, for the paving project. He measured corruption by hiring engineers to independently estimate the prices and quantities of the materials and services used for each road and then comparing those to villages' official expenditure reports.

The study included three different approaches to reducing corruption. In some of the villages, Mr. Olken increased the number of government audits of the road projects. In some, he handed out hundreds of invitations that encouraged local villagers to attend public meetings. There, road-project officials accounted for their spending. And in some villages, he distributed anonymous comment forms on which villagers could point out corruption without fear of retribution. The forms were later read aloud at the public meetings.

Mr. Olken found that, contrary to a popular theory that favors grass-roots or community participation as the key to reduced corruption, the traditional top-down monitoring played an important role in reducing corruption, even in a highly corrupt environment.

"It's quite remarkable to be the driving force in setting up" such a study, says Mr. Katz. Most scholars, says the professor, opt to run big "kitchen sink" regression analyses -- statistical methods used to estimate the relationships between many different variables. Mr. Olken got much more specific, teasing out the individual effects of specific practices on corruption and whether they matter.

Michael Kremer, an economist at Harvard, also praises Mr. Olken for his productivity and versatility. "It's his range of skills that's really unusual," agrees Mr. Katz. He's good at both theory and empirical work, they both say. And not only is Mr. Olken full of big ideas, says Mr. Katz, but he has an incredible ability to focus and get down to the details. "There is always a notepad out," he says. "Ben will come into your office with a list of 23 issues he wants to discuss." And he has fully fleshed out each one.

Mr. Olken is not always figuring out the answer to some vexing problem. He reads. He hikes mountains. His wife, Ms. Finkelstein, says he even procrastinates sometimes -- although that usually means he's on TradeSports.com, a Web site where people can bet on the outcome of sports games and political elections. "He finds almost everything interesting," she says, even cellphone plans. Cellphone plans? Mr. Olken is obsessed with them, she says. He keeps track of different options, determined to find the best deal.