News and Announcements
Three CEHD Scholars Move On to Pursue Doctorates at Top-Tier Institutions
Three of the Center’s predoctoral scholars, Ganesh Karapakula, Sidharth Moktan, and Tanya Rajan, have completed their research terms at the Center for the Economics of Human Development (CEHD). After three years of service, they are moving on to doctoral programs at first-rate institutions in the United States and abroad.New CEHD Research Shows Intergenerational Benefits from High-Quality ECE
New research from CEHD Director James J. Heckman and CEHD Predoctoral Fellow Ganesh Karapakula finds that targeted, high-quality early childhood investments have the power to lift multiple generations out of poverty.Professor Heckman Receives Award from the University of Chicago-Chapin Hall Joint Research Fund
CEHD Director James J. Heckman and Dr. Fred Wulczyn, Senior Research Fellow, Chapin Hall, have received a University of Chicago-Chapin Hall Joint Research Fund award for their project studying parental absence in China.Visiting Graduate Student Spotlight: Jiawei Lyu
Jiawei Lyu is a master’s student in Economics at Jinan University. As part of The Chicago-Jinan Initiative, a collaboration between CEHD and Jinan University’s Institute for Economic and Social Research, she was the inaugural visiting graduate student at the center in the fall of 2018. During her time at CEHD, she worked on the Mianzhu project, a collaboration with Jinan University on the topic of China’s left-behind children. Her current research interests include labor market discrimination, gender differences and left-behind children in China.CEHD Director James J. Heckman’s research featured in Quartz
CEHD Director James Heckman has “demonstrated the economic case for why the best investment a policymaker can make is in the earliest years of childhood,” writes Quartz.
The data provide clear guidelines for action. American policy should acknowledge the power of the accident of birth. A child does not choose the family he or she is born into. But society can enrich the opportunities of disadvantaged children to flourish.
– James J. Heckman
Events and Workshops
4:00pm
Saieh Hall 112
Actors in the Child Development Process
Ewout Verriest, New York University
Ewout Verriest is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Economics at New York University. This summer, he will be joining Penn State University as an assistant professor. His research interests lie in applied microeconomics, applied econometrics and labor economics, with a focus on household decision-making and child development..Learn More Here
4:30-6:00pm
University of Chicago Policy Forum: Assessing the Contributions of Behavioral Economics to Economic Science:
Chicago Economics has historically fostered intense discussions for the design and implementation of economic policy and the role of theory in guiding interpretation of evidence. Both are distinctive to the Chicago approach to economics. The forum will nurture the rich vitality of the Chicago tradition by engaging elite scholars on and off campus and will raise the level of discussion of economic policy based on credible statements of existing knowledge. Learn more.
5:15pm
Prosociality: Hard to build but easy to destroy
Fabian Kosse, LMU Munich & briq
The workshop takes place at 5:15pm at 5750 S. Woodlawn Avenue, Conference Room 180. Please enter through Saieh Hall. This interdisciplinary workshop is open to the campus research community. Learn more.
Visitors
Petra Todd
University of Pennsylvania
Visiting dates: May 10 2019
Petra Todd is also a Research Associate of Penn’s Population Studies Center. She serves as an Associate Editor for the American Economic Review and the Journal of Human Capital. Her main fields of research are social program evaluation, labor economics, and microeconometrics. She has published papers on the determinants of cognitive achievement, testing for discrimination in motor vehicle searches, sources of racial wage disparities, and methods for evaluating and optimally designing conditional cash transfer programs. She is currently working on implementing a large-scale randomized school incentive program in Mexican high schools, on analyzing the effects of school vouchers in Chile and on assessing the effects of government regulation on the operation of the privatized pension market in Chile.
Visiting dates: April 11 – 12, 2019
Andrew Shephard received his PhD from University College London in 2010. Before coming to Penn, he was Assistant Professor at Princeton University. His research interests include labor economics, public economics, microeconometrics, and applied microeconomics.
Victor Ronda
Aarhus University
Visiting dates: April 1 – May 31, 2019
Victor Ronda is an assistant professor at the Department of Economics and Business Economics at Aarhus University. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from Johns Hopkins University in 2017 and his B.A. in Economics and Mathematics from New York University in 2011. His primary research interests are in labor economics, health economics, child development, and structural micro. He is interested in all aspects of human capital formation. In his work, He aims to understand the role of parental investments, schooling resources and genetic endowments in the development of children's skills and behaviors.
Andros Kourtellos
University of Cyprus
Visiting dates: February 15, 2018 – July, 2019
Andros Kourtellos is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Cyprus. His primary research interests are econometrics, inequality, social mobility, economic growth, and macroeconomics. His work has documented the existence of status traps in intergenerational mobility, which can reduce the impact of favorable shocks or interventions for disadvantaged children and so hinder upward mobility. Recently, he also developed estimation and inference for a structural threshold regression model, which is particularly useful for the estimation of multiple equilibria and poverty traps. In general, his work focuses on issues of model uncertainly, parameter heterogeneity, nonlinearities, and mixed frequencies. His findings highlight the difficulty in evaluating causal claims when theory provides insufficient guidance for econometric specification, as is typically the case in empirical economic growth.