Andrew Foster came to Brown in 1998 and served as the PSTC director from 2011-2016. He is an empirical microeconomist working in the areas of population, development, and environmental economics. He has particular interest in sources of long economic and social mobility in low income rural areas.

In Bangladesh, Foster has been working with collaborators from the University of Colorado and the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research to collect the most recent round of a 40-year panel data set. His recent work has focused on the implications of household dissolution and recombination for evaluating long-term effects of access to health and family planning services.

In India, along with collaborators from Yale University and the Institute for Rural Management in Anand, Foster is examining barriers to long-term growth and labor force transition in rural India. He also has worked on the consequences of voluntary environmental certification in Mexico and on nursing home segregation in the U.S.