Janet M. Currie | |
---|---|
Born | |
Nationality | Canadian and American |
Academic career | |
Field | economics of children, labour economics, family economics, health economics |
Institutions | The Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
Alma mater | University of Toronto, Princeton University |
Doctoral advisor | Orley Ashenfelter, David Card, Angus Deaton |
Doctoral students | Lucia Nixon, Marianne Bitler, Matthew Neidell, Leah Brooks, Stephanie Riegg Cellini, Anna Aizer, Graciana Rucci, Graciela Teruel, Luis Rubalcava, John Fahr, Pia Orrenius, Rosemary Hyson, Chien-Liang Chen, Benjamin Bolitzer, Yan Lee, David Zulli, Hsinling Hsiao, Wanchuan Lin, Eliana Garcés Tolón, Nancy Cole, Steven Rivkin, Ninez Ponce, Mehdi Farsi, Emilia Simeonova, Johannes Schmeider, Joshua Goodman, Reed Walker, Muhammad Asali, Cecilia Machado, Katherine Meckel, Jessica Van Parys, Maya Rossin-Slater, Valentina Duque, Mariessa Hermann, Lauren Hersch Nicholas, Herdis Steingrimsdottir, Ayako Kondo, Laura Nolan, Diane Alexander, Fernanda Marquez-Padilla, David Slusky, Dan Zeltzer, Molly Schnell, Jenny Shen, Emily Cuddy, Rachel Anderson, Chris Mills, Anastasiya Karpova, Jessica Min, Patrick Agte |
Other notable students | Hannes Schwandt (postdoctoral fellow), Anna Chorniy (postdoctoral fellow), Esmee Zwiers (postdoctoral fellow), Adriana Corredor-Waldron (postdoctoral fellow), Jonathan Xia Zhang (postdoctoral fellow), Hui Ding (postdoctoral fellow), Boriana Miloucheva (postdoctoral fellow), Duncan Webb (postdoctoral fellow), Anna Miloucheva (postdoctoral fellow) |
Information at IDEAS / RePEc |
Janet Currie is a Canadian-American economist and the Henry Putnam Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University's School of Public and International Affairs, where she is Co-Director of the Center for Health and Wellbeing. [1] She was the 2024 President of the American Economic Association. She served as the Chair of the Department of Economics at Princeton from 2014–2018. [2] She also served as the first female Chair of the Department of Economics at Columbia University from 2006–2009. [3] Before Columbia, she taught at the University of California, Los Angeles and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was named one of the top 10 women in economics by the World Economic Forum in July 2015. [4] She was recognized for her mentorship of younger economists with the Carolyn Shaw Bell Award from the American Economics Association in 2015 and also participated in the founding and evaluation of the AEA’s mentoring program for junior faculty. [5] [6]
Currie received a B.A. in economics in 1982 and a M.A. in economics in 1983 from the University of Toronto. She then pursued graduate studies at Princeton University, where she received a Ph.D. in economics in 1988. [7]
Currie co-directs the Program on Children and Families at the National Bureau of Economic Research. [8] She is past president of the Society of Labor Economists, the Eastern Economics Association, [9] the Western Economics Association, and the American Society of Health Economics, and previously served as vice-president of the American Economic Association. Currie has served as a member of the Advisory Committee on Labor and Income Statistics for Statistics Canada and as a consultant for the National Health Interview Survey and the National Longitudinal Surveys. She has served on advisory boards of the National Children's Study, the Committee on National Statistics, the National Academy of Science, the Environmental Defense Fund, and Blue Health Intelligence, the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the board of governors of Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine, and the Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute at Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. She was appointed by the New Jersey state legislature to the board of the New Jersey Integrated Population Health Data Project.
She served on the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science magazine from 2014–2018, and as the editor of the Journal of Economic Literature [10] from 2010–2013. She has held various editorial roles for numerous economic peer-reviewed journals, including the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Health Economics, the Journal of Economic Perspectives , the Journal of Population Economics, the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics , and the Journal of Public Economics.
Currie is best known for her work on the impact of poverty and government anti-poverty policies on the health and well-being of children over their life cycle. She has written about early intervention programs, expansions of the Medicaid program, public housing, and food and nutrition programs. Beginning the early 1990s, she was one of the first economists to evaluate such programs from the point of view of the child. In work with Duncan Thomas and Eliana Garces, she showed that children in a public preschool program named Head Start made gains relative to their own siblings in terms of both test scores and longer-term measures of attainment. [11] [12] In work with Jonathan Gruber, she showed that expansions of public health insurance to low income women and children improved access to care and reduced infant mortality. [13] [14] Research on the effects of the safety net on American children is reviewed in her books: ″Welfare and the Wellbeing of Children″, and "The Invisible Safety Net." [15] [16] More recently, she has advocated for cash transfers, in conjunction with other safety net programs, given their helpfulness in raising families out of poverty. [17]
Currie has investigated broader socioeconomic determinants of fetal and child health, including health care, [18] [19] child maltreatment, [20] [21] nutrition, [22] [23] [24] environmental pollution, [25] [26] [27] and maternal education. [28] [29] [30] Her work showing that the adoption of EZ-Pass improved infant health in Pennsylvania and New Jersey received wide attention. [31] Some of her work showing disparities in fetal exposure to pollution and their consequences is summarized in her 2011 Ely lecture to the American Economics Association. [32] With Anna Aizer and Hannes Schwandt, she has shown that inequality in mortality is falling among U.S. children, at the same time that inequality in mortality among adults has been increasing, and attributed this improvement to the protective effect of safety net programs. [33] [34] Her work on health care has focused on differences in physician behavior as one of the key determinants in variation in the care both children and adults receive. [35] [36] Currie's work on child mental health shows that mental health is a stronger predictor of future outcomes than many common childhood physical health problems and that children's mental health is impacted by early life factors. [37] [38]
Overall, her work shows that early childhood, including the fetal period, is of great importance for the development of children's productive capabilities (their 'human capital') and that programs targeting early childhood can be particularly effective in remediating childhood disadvantage. [39] [40]
This work represents a departure from earlier work on collective bargaining in the public sector. [41] [42]
She is married to W. Bentley MacLeod, Professor Emeritus of Economics at Columbia University, and together they have two children. [43]
Sir Angus Stewart Deaton is a British-American economist and academic. Deaton is currently a Senior Scholar and the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of Economics and International Affairs Emeritus at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs and the Economics Department at Princeton University. His research focuses primarily on poverty, inequality, health, wellbeing, and economic development.
Michael Robert Kremer is an American development economist currently serving as University Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago and Director of the Development Innovation Lab at the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics. Kremer formerly served as the Gates Professor of Developing Societies at Harvard University, a role he held from 2003 to 2020. In 2019, Kremer was jointly awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, together with Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty."
Fabrizio Zilibotti is an Italian economist. He is the Tuntex Professor of International and Development Economics at Yale University. Zilibotti was previously professor of economics at University College London, the University of Zürich, and at the Institute for International Economic Studies in Stockholm.
Claudia Dale Goldin is an American economic historian and labor economist. She is the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University. In October 2023, she was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences "for having advanced our understanding of women's labor market outcomes”. The third woman to win the award, she was the first woman to win the award solo.
Demographic economics or population economics is the application of economic analysis to demography, the study of human populations, including size, growth, density, distribution, and vital statistics.
Armin Falk is a German economist. He has held a chair at the University of Bonn since 2003.
Heidi Williams is a Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College and Director of Science Policy at the Institute for Progress. She is a graduate of Dartmouth College, and earned her MSc in development economics from Oxford University and her PhD in Economics from Harvard University. Prior to Dartmouth, Williams was the Charles R. Schwab Professor of Economics at Stanford University and an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is a member of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Pascaline Dupas is a French economist whose research focuses on development economics and applied microeconomics, with a particular interest in health, education, and savings. She is a professor in economics and public affairs at Princeton University and is a co-chair of the Poverty Action Lab's health sector. She received the Best Young French Economist Prize in 2015.
Emi Nakamura is a Canadian-American economist. She is the Chancellor's Professor of Economics at University of California, Berkeley. Nakamura is a research associate and co-director of the Monetary Economics Program of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a co-editor of the American Economic Review.
Nava Ashraf, is a Canadian economist and academic. She is Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, as well as research director of the Marshall Institute for Philanthropy and Social Entrepreneurship. Her research interests include development economics, behavioral economics, and family economics.
Seema Jayachandran is an economist who currently works as Professor of Economics at Princeton University. Her research interests include development economics, health economics, and labor economics.
Anna Aizer is a labor and health economist, who currently serves as the Maurice R. Greenberg Professor of Economics at Brown University where she is also a Faculty Associate at the Population Studies and Training Center. Her research focuses on child health and well-being, in particular the effect of societal factors and social issues on children's health.
Adriana Lleras-Muney is a Colombian-American economist. She is currently a professor in the Department of Economics at UCLA. She was appointed as Associate Editor for the Journal of Health Economics in 2014, and she was elected as one of the six members of the American Economic Association Executive committee in 2018. Her research focuses on socio-economic status and health with a particular emphasis on education, income, and economic development. In 2017, she was received the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers from President Obama.
Robert Allen Moffitt is an American economist; he is currently the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Economics at Johns Hopkins University. His areas of research include the economics of tax and transfer programs, especially welfare programs, the analysis of earnings instability in the labor market, the economics of the family, and applied microeconometrics.
Petra Persson is a Swedish economist and Assistant Professor in Economics at Stanford University. Persson is best known for her work in Public and Labour Economics where her research focuses on the interactions between family decisions and the policy environment. Specifically, Persson's research agenda is centered on studying government policy, family wellbeing, and informal institutions.
Jeanne Lafortune is a Canadian economist who currently works as an Full Professor in Economics and Director of Research at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. She is also a researcher at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, which is a global research center that aims to reduce poverty and improve life quality of people in the Caribbean and Latin America. Lafortune holds a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her research interests focus on three main fields, including economic history, family and development economics.
Eric Baird French is the Montague Burton Professor of Industrial Relations and Labour Economics at the University of Cambridge. He is also a Co-Director at the ESRC Centre for the Microeconomic Analysis of Public Policy, a Fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies and a Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research. His research interests include: econometrics, labour and health economics.
Maya Rossin-Slater is an American health economist currently serving as Associate Professor of Health Policy in the Stanford University School of Medicine. Her research examines the causal effects of social policies and events in utero on the well-being of families and children in the United States. In 2023 Rossin-Slater received the Elaine Bennett Research Prize, awarded annually by the American Economic Association to the best female economist not more than ten years beyond her PhD. She is also the recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER Award.
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Lisa A. Gennetian is an American applied economist focused on behavioral economics, child development, specifically child poverty, parent engagement and decision making, and policy and social investment considerations. She is the Pritzker Professor of Early Learning Policy Studies at Duke University's Sanford School of Public Policy. Gennetian is associated with the Duke University Center for Child and Family Policy, Duke University's Population Research Institute (DuPRI), the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab and the National Bureau of Economic Research, Children's Program. She has served on the editorial board of the Child Development journal.