Faress Bhuiyan

Education & Professional History

Northwestern University, BA, MA, PhD

I spent much of my formative years growing up in a middle-income household in Dhaka, Bangladesh. My interest in development is strongly related to my upbringing there. I left Bangladesh in 2000 and received a bachelors and subsequently masters and doctoral degrees in Economics from Northwestern University (IL, USA). Although I began college with the aim of studying Physics and Mathematics, thanks to some incredible economics professors at Northwestern, during my sophomore year, I decided to change my focus towards Economics.

Living in Bangladesh, I have always been astonished by the high degree of conspicuous consumption that people of all socioeconomic backgrounds seem to indulge in. I was convinced very early on that interpersonal comparisons play a major role in individual decisions. Consequently, my graduate work involved constructing a theoretical model of interdependent preferences to study how peer comparisons affect labor supply decisions, subjective well-being, rural-to-urban migration and the economy as a whole. My research has since expanded to determinants of different subjective wellbeing measures, mental suffering, quality of life research, microfinance, survey methodology, perception formation, and income inequality, particularly as it all relates to economic development.

I enjoy teaching microeconomics of development, labor economics, and welfare economics.  A huge fan of the Bangladesh cricket team, the Argentine soccer team, Barcelona FC and mainstream music, I love playing soccer, cricket, badminton, ping pong and listening to music.

Organizations & Scholarly Affiliations

President, Nourish Bangladesh

GLO Fellow, Global Labor Organization

Advisor, The Happiness Alliance

Consultant, Global Team for Local Initiatives

Director, Winter Break Off-Campus Studies to Bangladesh, Carleton College, MN

Off-Campus Studies Fellow (past), Carleton College, MN

Director, Minnesota Economic Association (past)

Reviewer:

• World Development
• Applied Economics (Incorporating Applied Financial Economics)
• Journal of Business Venturing
• Journal of Happiness Studies
• Economics Journal of International Wellbeing
• Journal of Economics and International Finance
• Choice, Association of College and Research Libraries

Member:

• International Society for Quality of Life Studies
• Midwest Economic Association
• American Economic Association
• Western Economic Association International

Published And Forthcoming Work

“Essays on Relative Consumption, Peers, Labor Supply and Migration.” Doctoral Dissertation, Northwestern University: ProQuest/UMI, 2010 (ProQuest Document ID. 763001007).

“Relative Consumption: A Model of Peers, Status, and Labor Supply,” American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 2013, 95 (2), 368 – 375.

“Extreme Bounds of Subjective Well-Being: Economic Development and Micro-Determinants of Life Satisfaction,” with Radek Szulga, Applied Economics, 2017, 49 (14), 1351 – 1378.

“Mitigating Survey Fraud and Human Error: Lessons Learned from a Low Budget Census in Bangladesh,” with Paula Lackie, IASSIST Quarterly, 2016, 40(3), 20 – 26.

“Alleviating Mental Suffering in Rural Bangladesh: Evidence from a Survey of Three Villages.” Alleviating World Suffering. Springer International Publishing, 2017. 109-129.

“The Tangail Survey: Household Level Census of Subjective Well-Being, Perceptions of Relative Economic Position, and International Migration: 2013 [Tangail, Bangladesh],” with Radek Szulga, Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2016-03-23.

“Life Satisfaction and Economic Position Relative to Neighbors: Perceptions Versus Reality.” Journal of Happiness Studies, 2018, 19 (7), 1935 – 1964.

“Micro-entrepreneurship and subjective well-being: Evidence from Bangladesh,” with Artjoms Ivlevs, Journal of Business Venturing, 2019, 34 (4), 625 – 645. 

“COVID-19 and Information Flows: Social Networks and Coping Mechanism in Rural Bangladesh 2022 [Tangail, Bangladesh],” with Md Izazul Haq, Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2022-12-28.

Work Submitted or In Progress

“Linking Panel with Cross-Sectional Data in a Fixed Effects Context” with K. St. Clair

“Gender, Economic Development, and Micro-Determinants of Life Satisfaction,” with R. Szulga

“Catching Up With The Joneses: How Urbanization Affects Inequality, Migration and Well-Being?”