Peter Courtney

Peter Courtney is a development economist and PhD candidate at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (Tinbergen Institute) and Stellenbosch University, on the 2026–27 academic job market. Economics of education, economic history and public economics in Africa.

On the 2026–27 academic job market

I am a development economist completing a joint PhD in economics at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (Tinbergen Institute) and Stellenbosch University. My research asks how school systems in developing countries can raise learning quickly when there is little money to spend.

I work with South Africa’s national administrative records at full scale: the learner register (65 million learner-years), teacher payroll and exam data. Each of my thesis papers measures something the state does not: learning that is comparable across schools without a common test, how far apartheid’s abolished borders still shape schooling, and how much of each extra teacher post reaches the classroom.

I also work directly with governments. I advise the Western Cape Education Department on reading-assessment data as testing scales to about 200,000 students, and I have built data pipelines and dashboards for Gates Foundation partners in Kenya and West Africa. Before the PhD I worked at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization and J-PAL Africa. My research has been supported by an Orange Knowledge Scholarship, an Oppenheimer Memorial Trust Scholarship, an Emergent Ventures grant and the 2025 C. Lowell Harriss Dissertation Fellowship.

Outside economics I write The Maximin, a Substack on economic history, political philosophy and global inequality, and I spend as much time as I can trail running and hiking, photographing plants, birds and butterflies along the way.

Primary fields
Development economics, economics of education
Secondary fields
Economic history, public economics
PhD expected
July 2027
Placement director
Prof. Eric Bartelsman, Tinbergen Institute ([email protected])
Placement assistant
Christina Månsson, Tinbergen Institute ([email protected])
Email

Job market paper

Making School-Set Assessments Comparable: How School Assessments Hide Learning Inequality

I put the school-set marks of 1.2 million South African students on one comparable scale, without a new test. Raw marks show only about a third of the learning gap between rich and poor schools.

Abstract Paper Online appendix

Application materials