Stephen Kosack is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Kennedy School. His work focuses on the causes of policymaking decisions in developing countries. He has written on foreign aid, foreign-direct investment, education, human development, civil society, and democratic governance in the journals International Organization, Comparative Education, World Development, and the Singapore Economic Review; in a book, From the Ground Up: Improving Government Performance with Independent Monitoring Organizations (Brookings Institution Press, 2010; with Charles Griffin and Courtney Tolmie); as well as in a number of policy pieces for organizations like the UNDP and the Brookings Institution.

He received his Ph.D. in political science in 2008 from Yale University, where he was a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and a Leylan Prize Fellow. Before joining the Kennedy School, he was an economics advisor to the late Senator Ted Kennedy and a research fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, and taught at Brown and the London School of Economics.