Department
School
Expertise
Dr. Richard Gallenstein joined the faculty at The Catholic University of America in the fall of 2017 after completing his Ph.D. at The Ohio State University that same year. Dr. Gallenstein specializes in development economics and his research focuses predominantly on issues related to risk management, agricultural investment, and microfinance in developing countries. He is currently teaching in the Integral Economic Development Master's programs.
During his graduate career, Dr. Gallenstein co-managed two international research and capacity building projects in sub-Saharan Africa. The first was a three-year randomized control trial experiment investigating the impact of index based drought insurance on credit market access for small scale farmers in Ghana. For this project, he also worked with fourteen rural and community banks to establish feasible insured loan products for their farming clients. The second project involved conducting two framed field experiments that investigated the impact of index based drought insurance on farmers' agricultural investment decisions in Tanzania. Dr. Gallenstein also served as a program manager for the Innovative Agricultural Research Initiative in Tanzania where he helped to build research capacity at the Sokoine University of Agricultural through student mentorship and educational seminars on research methodologies.