Ahmed Elsayed

Ahmed Elsayed is the Executive Director of J-PAL MENA at the American University in Cairo and an Associate Professor at the School of Business at the same university. In this capacity, he plays a crucial role in J-PAL MENA's operations by providing strategic and technical oversight to research, policy outreach, and capacity-building activities. His role involves guiding the strategic direction and growth of the organization and cultivating partnerships with innovative policymakers across the MENA region to foster evidence generation and usage.

Prior to joining AUC and J-PAL in 2022, Ahmed spent eight years as a Senior Researcher at the IZA- Institute of Labor Economics in Bonn, Germany where he acted as the Deputy Program Director of the Research Program "Gender, Growth, and Labor Markets in Low-Income Countries (G²LM|LIC)”, a joint initiative between the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) in the UK government and IZA in Germany aiming at building scientific evidence on the labor market and gender issues in the developing world.

Ahmed is currently a Research Fellow at IZA, the Research Centre for Education and the Labour Market (ROA) in the Netherlands, and the Economic Research Forum (ERF) in Egypt. His main research interests are in development economics, applied micro-econometrics, migration, and labor economics. He is particularly interested in the intersection between research and policy in the area of development.

He received his MSc in Business Research and Ph.D. in Economics from the Maastricht University School of Business and Economics in the Netherlands.