Her research interests are varied but center on topics of trust, cooperation, exchange and punishment. She carried out extended fieldwork in West Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo, where her research focused on the spread of formal financial institutions such as banks and credit unions as well as the persistence of local, traditional, and informal financial institutions such as the rotating savings and credit association locally known as arisan. She is interested in how the use of these financial institutions relates to other aspects of life, particularly education, migration, labor, and land-use. She received a Fulbright Award and a Boren Fellowship in support of her research in Indonesian Borneo, and with the support of three Foreign Language Area Studies award, has developed near-native fluency in Bahasa Indonesia.