Silvia Prina is an Associate Professor at Northeastern Economics. She completed her PhD in Economics at Boston University in 2007.

She is a development economist interested in understanding the behavior of poor households for the purpose of uncovering potential strategies to improve their lives. Her first set of papers investigates how financial access, particularly via savings accounts (mobile and not) and digital credit, can affect the saving and investment behavior, networks, preferences, cognitive ability, mental health, and aspirations of the poor. A second set of papers investigates the determinants of investments in human capital and health. Her works feature rigorous empirical methods and the implementation of unique, randomized interventions to answer questions of central importance in development economics. She has been and is working on several field experiments in Mexico and Latin America, Nepal, Tanzania, Uganda, and the U.S.

Silvia Prina joined IZA as a Research Fellow in September 2022.