David Rhys Bernard

Fernando de la Mora, Paraguay

Grantmaker

Bio

Updated 03/22/26

David Rhys Bernard is an Associate Program Officer on the Global Catastrophic Risks Capacity Building team at Coefficient Giving (formerly Open Philanthropy), which he joined in January 2024. He holds a PhD in Economics from the Paris School of Economics, where his thesis examined the performance of non-experimental methods against experimental benchmarks. His earlier education includes a Master's in Public Policy and Development and a BA in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. Prior to Coefficient Giving, he was a Senior Researcher on the Worldview Investigations Team at Rethink Priorities, where he authored reports on global health, cause prioritization, and development interventions including studies on lead exposure, charter cities, and agricultural land redistribution. His core research focuses on causal inference, applied econometrics, and estimating long-term treatment effects using surrogate outcome methods. He co-authored a study testing the accuracy of experienced forecasters, academic experts, and laypeople in predicting long-run causal effects, finding that experienced forecasters outperform other groups partly due to superior calibration. He is also affiliated with CEPR as a development economics researcher.