Before that, she was a Senior Lecturer in the Economics Faculty of Cambridge University and Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. She began her academic life as an econometrician working on models of self-selection before seeing the light and moving on to work in development economics. Her research has concentrated on applied micro-economics and she has worked on topics ranging from household portfolios of poor households, to risk-sharing, intra-household allocation and informal insurance, social networks, non-cognitive skills and whether migrants might be both rich and happy