Shawn Cole is a Research Fellow at CERP. He is the John G. McLean Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Previously he was a professor in the Finance Unit at Harvard where he taught and conducted research on financial services and social enterprise. He is an affiliate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD). He is on the board of the Jameel Poverty Action Lab, as the co-chair for research. He also serves as an external advisor to the Gates Foundation. Before joining Harvard Business School, Dr Shawn worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in the Economic Research Department. He has served on the Boston Federal Reserve’s Community Development Research Advisory Council and was the chair of the endowment management committee of the Telluride Association, a non-profit educational organisation. In 2015, he was also given a ‘Faculty Pioneer Award’ from the Aspen Institute. Much of his research examines corporate and household finance in emerging markets, with a focus on insurance, credit, and savings. For his work on insurance, he received the 2015 ‘Shin Research Excellence Award’. He has also done extensive work on financial education in the US and emerging markets. His recent research focuses on designing and delivering advice and education over mobile phones, with an emphasis on agricultural and financial management. Dr Shawn received a PhD in Economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2005, where he was a NSF and Javits Fellow, and an AB in Economics and German Literature from Cornell University.