Nigar Nargis received her Bachelor and Master of Social Science degrees in Economics from the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. She was awarded PhD in Economics in 2003 under the supervision of Professor J.S. Butler from the Department of Economics at Cornell University.

Nigar has written three papers for her PhD dissertation. The first paper investigates intra-household decision making on savings for old age in the U.S. The second paper studies the moderate wage growth in France compared to productivity growth as an explanation for high employment performance in the 1990s. The third paper looks into the volatility of individual position in the earning distribution and its implications for the measurement of economic mobility.

She joined IZA as a research affiliate in January 2003 and became a Research Fellow in May 2008.

Nigar was a post-doctoral fellow of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Strategic Training Programme in Tobacco Research and affiliated with the Department of Psychology at the University of Waterloo in Canada during 2006-2009.

She is currently serving as a Scientific Director, Economic and Health Policy Research at the American Cancer Society in the United States.

Current Research: Compensatory behaviour of smokers and their price responsiveness, employment impact of the microcredit programme in Bangladesh, economics of tobacco control.