Khaled Eltokhy

about

I am a PhD candidate in Economics at the CUNY Graduate Center. Prior to starting my PhD, I worked at the International Monetary Fund on public investment management.

I study why governments fail to build what they promise. In many developing countries, the same budget that delivers housing and roads in one district produces abandoned construction sites in another. These gaps between policy and implementation shape where people can afford to live, which neighborhoods get services, and whether cities grow or stagnate.

My current work focuses on Egypt's urban development - tracking how enforcement shocks affect informal construction, how local state capacity determines infrastructure placement, and how information frictions shape household decisions during policy changes. The empirical challenges have led me to develop new measurement approaches: building pipelines to extract structured data from Arabic administrative documents, combining satellite imagery with local records, and using LLMs to parse government PDFs at scale. These patterns - state capacity constraints, informal markets, implementation gaps - recur across developing countries, making Egypt a useful case for understanding broader questions about how states function when formal institutions are weak.

The core challenge is measurement. We know surprisingly little about what governments actually build versus what they budget for, and that gap matters for understanding why development happens where it does.