Mike Bailey

Mike Bailey is a Senior Advisor at J-PAL Global, where he supports J-PAL's AI portfolio across research, policy, partnerships, and capacity building. He works closely with Project AI Evidence (PAIE), J-PAL's initiative to identify, evaluate, and scale innovative applications of AI for social good, and advises on partnerships with AI labs and technology companies, government-facing AI innovation, and the evaluation of AI tools in low- and middle-income countries.

Prior to joining J-PAL in 2026, Mike spent fourteen years at Meta, where he was one of the company's first economists and founded and led several research teams, including the Social Capital Lab, a group that partnered with academics and policy organizations to study social networks, communities, and economic opportunity. His research on social networks has been published in leading scientific journals including Nature and the Journal of Political Economy, and featured by outlets such as The Economist and The New York Times. He is a co-creator of the Social Connectedness Index and the Social Capital Atlas, publicly available datasets measuring social connectedness, and partnered with Harvard's Opportunity Insights to create socialcapital.org.

Mike holds a PhD in economics from Stanford University and a BS in mathematics and a BA in economics from Utah State University.