Assistant Professor, New York University, Stern School of Business
Theme Leader, The Role of the Public Sector, STEG
Research Fellow, CEPR, CESifo, and HCEO
Fellow, Royal Economic Society, FDL, AUL, and BWC
Research Interests: Macroeconomics, Public Finance, Development, Political Economy
cv, contact, research statement
9/5/2026: A revised version of Flexible Retirement and Optimal Taxation is posted
8/13/2026: Recognized in The Africa Report's list of 26 Africans making waves in 2026
7/15/2026: A revised version of Property Taxes and Housing Allocation Under Financial Constraints is posted
7/15/2026: A draft of Tax Productivity and Development: A Quantitative Macroeconomic Analysis is posted
7/7/2026: A revised version of Blockchain Fee Policies: Quantity- vs Price-Control Design across Protocols is posted
6/11/2026: A revised version of A Theory of International Boycotts is posted
5/15/2026: Awarded the 2026 NextGen Best African Economist Under 40 Award by the African Development Bank, Africa Report, and Jeune Afrique, and elected Fellow of the Royal Economic Society
Revised and Resubmitted at Quarterly Journal of Economics
Abdoulaye Ndiaye and Zhixiu Yu
Coverage: Chicago Fed letter
Revised and Resubmitted at American Economic Review
Joshua Coven, Sebastian Golder, Arpit Gupta, and Abdoulaye Ndiaye
2026 Yuki Arai Research Prize
Coverage: Bloomberg, Minneapolis Fed, Homes.com, CoStar News, Arpitrage, The Roundup, NYU Stern Research Highlights, Slate, TaxProf Blog
Revised and Resubmitted at Management Science
Abdoulaye Ndiaye
Coverage: a16z Crypto Research
Revised and Resubmitted at Journal of International Economics
Abdoulaye Ndiaye
Coverage: NPR Marketplace, La Tribune
Forthcoming at American Economic Review: Insights, Vol. 8, No. 4, December 2026
Meghana Gaur, John Grigsby, Jonathon Hazell, and Abdoulaye Ndiaye
Coverage: Marginal Revolution, NYU Stern Research Highlights, Atlanta Fed
Journal of Monetary Economics, volume 150, March 2025, 103699
Abdoulaye Ndiaye, Kyle Herkenhoff, Abdoulaye Cisse, Alessandro Dell'Acqua, and Ahmadou A. Mbaye
Coverage: VoxDev, Brookings Africa Growth Initiative, World Bank
Journal of Political Economy Macroeconomics, vol. 1, num. 2, pp. 371-402, June 2023
Pawel Doligalski, Abdoulaye Ndiaye, and Nicolas Werquin
Coverage: Minneapolis Fed OIGI
Forthcoming at Oxford Review of Economic Policy
Louphou Coulibaly and Abdoulaye Ndiaye
ACM FC 2025: Proceedings of the International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security, February 2026, pp 245–262
Abdoulaye Ndiaye
Coverage: a16z Crypto Research
ACM FC 2024: Proceedings of the International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security, February 2025, pp 303–313
Abdoulaye Ndiaye
Radhika Goyal, Andres Jensen, David Lagakos, Abdoulaye Ndiaye, and Yuntian Zhao
Olalekan Bello, Claudia Macaluso, and Abdoulaye Ndiaye
Bocar A. Ba, Abdoulaye Ndiaye, Roman G. Rivera, and Alexander Whitefield
Augustin Bergeron and Abdoulaye Ndiaye
Abstract: Does state legitimacy shape citizens’ resistance to state demands? We study this question in colonial Nigeria, where British rule imposed a common fiscal regime across areas with sharply different pre-colonial sources of fiscal legitimacy. In the Sokoto Caliphate, taxation had been embedded in a long-standing Islamic fiscal order and colonial rule displaced this institutional basis for taxation by secularizing or banning islamic taxes. We assemble and analyze nearly 50,000 tax-related documents from Nigeria’s colonial archives, using large language models to measure tax attitudes and formal complaints. Exploiting the historical boundary of the Sokoto Caliphate in a spatial regression discontinuity design, we find substantially more negative tax sentiment and more formal complaints in areas where colonial taxation displaced the pre-colonial fiscal order. Several findings point to legitimacy as the mechanism: resistance is stronger with greater exposure to Sokoto institutions, complaints are disproportionately associated with Muslim names and with taxes previously contested on Islamic grounds, and the results are not explained by differences in tax policy, enforcement, administration, public goods, or demographics. The legitimacy gap remains detectable in contemporary attitudes toward the state’s right to tax. Our findings identify legitimacy as a distinct constraint on the state’s ability to implement policy.
Data collection completed. Location: Ghana
Francis Annan and Abdoulaye Ndiaye
In the field. DigiFi grant. Location: Kanifing, The Gambia
Hamidou Jawara, Justine Knebelmann, Joseph Levine, Abdoulaye Ndiaye, and Victor Pouliquen
Ebehi Iyoha and Abdoulaye Ndiaye
Olalekan Bello, Simone Lenzu, Toni Oki, and Abdoulaye Ndiaye
Abdoulaye Ndiaye and Zhixiu Yu
A Strategic Compass for Navigating Senegal's Debt Crisis
Finance for Development Lab. Policy Note 31, January 2026
Abdoulaye Ndiaye and Martin Kessler
The AI Agent Revolution in Crypto: Looming Risks and Regulatory Opportunities
Competition Policy International, January 2025
Kevin M.K. Fodouop and Abdoulaye Ndiaye
Financing unemployment insurance in high-informality economies: A survey analysis of Senegal
Brookings Policy Brief, Global Economy & Development, 2023
Ahmadou Aly Mbaye, Abdoulaye Ndiaye, Kyle Herkenhoff, Abdoulaye Cisse, and Alessandro Dell’Acqua
Reforming Social Security to Save Social Security
Chicago Fed Letter, 2019 No 419
Abdoulaye Ndiaye and Lisa Camner McKay
Gestion Optimale des Réserves de Change dans l'UEMOA, 2016
Abdoulaye Ndiaye
Assessing the Inclusiveness of Growth in Africa: Evidence from Senegal, Cameroon, and Tanzania
UNU WIDER, 2014/120
Georges Vivien Houngbonon, Arthur Bauer, Abdoulaye Ndiaye, Clara Champagne, Tite Yokossi, Nathalie Ferrière, Hédi Brahimi, and Jeanne Avril
"Taxing Water Usage in Developing Countries: Theory and Evidence from Mexico" by Alejandro Estefan at National Tax Association Meetings 2023
"Expansion of Piped Water and Sewer Networks: The Effects of Regulation" by Bruna Morais Guidetti and Carolina Tojal Ramos dos Santos at National Tax Association Meetings 2023
"Larger transfers financed with more progressive taxes? On the optimal design of taxes and transfers" by Ferriere, Grubener, Navarro, and Vardishvili at National Tax Association Meetings 2021
"Optimal Fiscal Policy in a Model with Uninsurable Idiosyncratic Shocks" by Sebastian Dyrda and Marcelo Pedroni at National Tax Association Meetings 2021
"The Taxation of Couples" by Felix Bierbrauer, Pierre Boyer, Andreas Peichl, and Daniel Weishaar at National Tax Association Meetings 2020
"Politics and Income Taxes: Progress and Progressivity" by Marcus Berliant and Pierre Boyer at National Tax Association Meetings 2020
"Capitalist Human Capital" by Vincenzo Quadrini, Qi Sun, and Yicheng Wang at Tsinghua Workshop in Macroeconomics 2019
``Politically feasible reforms of non-linear tax systems" by Felix J. Bierbrauer and Pierre C. Boyer at Fourth Taxation Theory Conference 2018
``Income Taxation, Firing Costs and Insurance within Firm'' by Pawel Doligalski at National Tax Association Meetings 2017
``Inverse December Fever'' by Zareh Asatryan, Andreas Peichl, Thomas Schwab, and Johannes Voget at National Tax Association Meetings 2017
Part I - Classical Public Finance Revisited
Lecture 0: Introduction to Macro Public Finance Slides, Lecture Notes
Lecture 1: Commodity Taxation and Productive Efficiency Slides
Lecture 2: Wealth and Capital Taxation in Ramsey Model: Chamley-Judd Slides
Lecture 3: Wealth and Capital Taxation Revisited: Straub-Werning Slides
Lecture 4: Nonlinear Income Taxation Slides, Deterministic Optimal Control Notes
Part II - Dynamic Income Taxation
Lecture 5: Dynamic Taxation I: Capital Taxation Slides
Lecture 6: Dynamic Taxation II: Labor Income Taxation Slides
Lecture 7: Optimal Taxation with Endogenous Wages
Slides:Optimal Taxation and Human Capital Policies, S. Stantcheva
Slides: Redistribution and Performance Pay, P. Doligalski, A. Ndiaye, N. Werquin
Lecture 8: Disability Insurance Slides
Part III - Contemporary Topics in Macro PF
Lecture 9: Taxation and Aggregate Shocks Slides
Lecture 10: Efficiency of Wealth vs Capital Gains Taxation
Slides: Use it or Lose it: Efficiency Gains from Wealth Taxation, Guvenen et al.
Slides: Efficient Redistribution, Boar and Midrigan
Lecture 11: Gender
Lecture 12: Discrimination and Racial Inequality Slides
Lecture1: Intro to Macro Development
Lecture 2: Growth, Infrastructure, and Technological Change
Lecture 3: Productivity and Human Capital in Developing Countries
Lecture 4: Agriculture, Manufacturing, and Services: Key Concepts of Structural Transformation
2024-2025: Abdoulaye Cissé, UC Berkeley ARE
Placement: Princeton Postdoc, World Bank
2023-2024: Alessandro Dell'Acqua, NYU Stern Predoc
Placement: PhD in Economics, UC Berkeley
2022-2023: Yifan Shi, NYU Research Assistant
Placement: Predoc in Finance, Kellogg
2018-2019: Richard De Thorpe, Chicago Fed Predoc
Placement: PhD in Economics, Princeton
What Economists Do: A Practical Map of Careers, Training, and PhD Pathways
VoxDev, Last Updated: December 28, 2025
Abdoulaye Ndiaye
Organising a high-quality conference with equal access: Lessons learned from the VMACS Junior Conference
VoxEU, September 21, 2020
Abdoulaye Ndiaye
