Diana Fletschner


Diana Fletschner
Assistant Professor of Public Affairs
Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2002

Contact Information:
Parrington Hall, room 229
fletschn@u.washington.edu
206.616.1297

Areas of Specialization: Development Economics, Economics of Gender, Intrahousehold Decision-Making, Behavioral Economics, Group Effects, Rural Credit Markets, Microfinance

Diana Fletschner joined the Evans School faculty in 2002. Her research focuses primarily on the factors that shape rural women’s access to economic opportunities in developing countries. Much of Fletschner’s work to date has been in the context of rural financial markets and women’s access to credit.

She studies how behavioral attributes, intrahousehold dynamics, and social conditions influence or constrain the economic choices rural women make. More specifically, Fletschner has examined factors that affect whether rural women demand entrepreneurial capital or engage in economic activities that, while expected to offer higher returns, can be riskier, take place in a competitive environment, conflict with their husbands’ preferences, or contravene well-established norms of behavior.

In parallel, Fletschner has also done work to assess rural households’ economic efficiency and how it is affected by supply and demand-side constraints in men’s and women’s access to credit; and is currently exploring gender-differentiated patterns of access to information and sharing of financial knowledge among spouses.

Fletschner has done research and worked with NGOs in Paraguay, Peru, Colombia, Nicaragua, Vietnam and the US. She is the author of “Rural Women’s Access to Capital: Intrahousehold Bargaining and Social Effects” and her work has been published by the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Journal of Socio-Economics, World Development, Journal of Development Studies, Revista Paraguaya de Sociología, and the Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics.

Fletschner teaches courses on microeconomics and policy of rural development, macroeconomics of international development, and quantitative methods. She teaches in the International Development Certificate Program and is the faculty director of the Hubert H. Humphrey Program that brings mid-career professionals from developing countries and economies in transition for a one-year fellowship at the Evans School.

She has been a board member of the Foundation for International Understanding Through Students (FIUTS) and has served as a member of the Oversight Committee of the Nicaraguan Credit Alternatives Fund (NICA Fund) of the Working Capital for Community Needs, an organization now working in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. She received the 2008 Evans Students’ Mentoring Award and the 2001 University of Wisconsin’s Graduate Student Mentor Award.

Before coming to the United States, she lived mostly in Paraguay where she worked as a computer consultant and served as assistant professor in the Economics and Computer Science Departments of the Universidad Nacional del Paraguay and Universidad Católica Nuestra Señora de la Asunción.

Fletschner holds a Ph.D. in Agricultural and Applied Economics and a Master of Science in Agricultural Economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was a MacArthur-Global Studies Fellows and received the Taylor Hibbard Doctoral Dissertation Award. She also holds summa cum laude BAs in economics and computer science from the Universidad Nacional de Asunción-Paraguay.

Curriculum Vitae (48KB PDF)

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