News and Announcements
Professor James J. Heckman Receives Prestigious Friendship Award
Nobel Laureate James J. Heckman, the Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago, has received the Friendship Award from the Chinese government. Established in 1991, the Friendship Award is the highest honor issued by the Chinese government to foreign experts. Awardees are chosen for their outstanding contributions to China’s economic and social progress. The award is not only presented in recognition of the foreign expert’s contribution to the Chinese but also a symbol of friendship.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.
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
5:15pm
CEHD 180
General Equilibrium Theory and Empirical Analysis of Immigrants’ Neighborhood Sorting and Social Integration
Yujung Hwang, University of Geneva
Hwang's paper, "A General Equilibrium Analysis of Immigrants’ Neighborhood Sorting and Social Integration," examines how immigrants culturally assimilate and how people change prejudice against immigrants. The first chapter builds a structural model to explain the dynamics of cultural assimilation and prejudice change. The main mechanism is through endogenous social group formation. Neighborhoods are used as measurements for social groups. Immigrants who segregate into ethnic enclaves have limited interactions with natives so they have less incentive to adopt natives’ cultural traits. Natives who rarely meet immigrants will have less chance to change their prejudice against immigrants. The second chapter presents detailed identification results and Monte Carlo evidence. The third chapter points out that cultural assimilation and economic assimilation are theoretically equivalent and therefore must be studied in a single framework. When the dynamics of cultural and economic assimilation highly depends on each other, perfect assimilation in one dimension must imply perfect assimilation in another. Register Here to Attend
Conference on Statistics, Theory, and Data: an Econometrics Conference in Honor of James Heckman
The Conference on Statistics, Theory, and Data: an Econometrics Conference in Honor of James Heckman is being hosted at the Becker Friedman Institute and organized by Professors Steven Durlauf (University of Chicago) and Ed Vytlacil (Yale University) on August 9th and 10th and the University of Chicago.
This conference is by invitation only. For information, visit the conference website, or email: coordinator.hceo@gmail.com
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.
Current Visitors
Bei Liu
Visiting dates: August 26, 2019 - February 2, 2020
Bei Liu is an Associate Research Fellow and Program Officer at the China Development Research Foundation (CDRF), a policy research and advocacy organization founded by the Development Research Center of the State Council. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Liu joined CDRF in 2007. She participated in research on Chinese government performance appraisal, grassroots governance in rural China and CDRF policy briefings on Chinese and global economy and social development. Starting from 2009, her professional experiences are focused on the implementation and evaluation of CDRF’s pilot program of early childhood development in poor rural areas. Dr. Liu’s work has been published in policy research reports of the Development Research Center of the State Council, and China Development Report 2011/2012.
Yang Yumei
Visiting dates: September 14, 2019 - August 31, 2020
Yang Yumei is an Assistant Professor at Beijing Forestry University and Research Fellow at IZA. She obtained her Ph.D. and M.A. in Economics at Remin University of China, and B.A. in Management from Shandong University. Her interests include Labor Economics and Personnel Economics, with a focus on the rural-urban migration in China, development of left-behind children, evaluation of labor market programs and the impact of HRM on labor relations.
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.