Miranda Lambert (she/her) is a development and experimental economist who studies how people make decisions under conditions of risk, uncertainty, and conflict. Her research combines field experiments, lab experiments, and other empirical methods to examine questions spanning household well-being, gender, and economic behavior. This includes work on the long-run consequences of conflict and childhood trauma.
As a postdoctoral researcher affiliated with CONVERGE, Miranda is part of the team behind OMEGA, an ARPA-H proposal to build a wearable device that detects fetal hypoxia during labor and identifies its likely cause in real time. She works with Baruch Fischhoff and CONVERGE's Tamar Krishnamurti on end-user engagement for the project, applying decision science methods to ensure OMEGA delivers information to patients, providers, and families in an accessible, actionable format.
Outside of work, Miranda's hobbies include bar trivia and crocheting, pursued with more enthusiasm than expertise. She and her partner also share their home with more cats than is probably reasonable who make a habit of joining her Zoom calls.
Lambert, M. (2026). War, abduction, and household violence: Evidence from Uganda. Working paper.
- Using survey and lab-in-the-field data from 214 couples in Northern Uganda, this paper examines how childhood abduction during the country's civil conflict shapes intimate partner violence in adulthood. It finds that the risk to a spouse depends not just on one's own abduction history but on the interaction between both partners' experiences of childhood trauma, with effects that carry into the next generation.
Eckel, C. C., Gangadharan, L., Grossman, P. J., Lambert, M., & Xue, N. (2025). The gender leadership gap in competitive and cooperative institutions. Working paper (revise & resubmit at Management Science).
- Using an experiment where leaders advise their team under either competitive or cooperative incentive structures, this study finds that male and female leaders are equally effective, but in competitive settings, female leaders are rated lower than men for giving identical advice, a gap that disappears in cooperative settings.
Cassar, A., Grosjean, P., Khan, F. J., & Lambert, M. (2023). Mothers, fathers, and others: Competition and cooperation in the aftermath of conflict. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 215, 207–223 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2023.09.007
Cassar, A., Kandpal, E., Lambert, M., Mpyangu, C. M., & Serra, D. (2026). From childhood abduction to adulthood: Enduring consequences for women in Uganda. Journal of Development Economics, 182(C). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jdeveco.2026.103766