Pia Malaney is an economist based in New York City whose research has focused on economic, biological, and sociological approaches to human welfare. Her dissertation written under Eric Maskin, established a new Gauge Theoretic foundation for welfare economics allowing biological and behavioral realism for dynamic economic agents. After earning her Ph.D, she moved to the Harvard Institute for International Development and the Center for International Development at Harvard’s Kennedy School where she worked in collaboration with Asian and African governments of the development of health care and economic policies. Her research on the economic burden of disease combined biological, welfare and financial approaches to the cost accounting for pandemics such as HIV/AIDS and Malaria appearing in Nature, the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, Population and Development Review, and other interdisciplinary venues. Dr. Malaney’s book “The Quality of Life in Rural Asia” written for the Asian Development Bank (with co-authors D. Bloom and P. Craig) diversified emphasis from the purely biological to the sociological by basing its findings on focus groups designed and conducted by the authors in various Asian nations. Dr. Malaney’s current research focus is the role of scientific realism in the foundations of economic theory and its expected effects on the economics of development, education, gender, and welfare.
