Janet M. Currie | |
---|---|
Born | |
Nationality | Canadian and American |
Academic career | |
Field | economics of children, labour economics, family economics, health economics |
Institutions | |
Alma mater | University of Toronto, Princeton University |
Doctoral advisor | Orley Ashenfelter, David Card, Angus Deaton |
Doctoral students | Anna Aizer, Diane Alexander, Emily Cuddy, Joshua Goodman, Ayako Kondo, Wanchuan Lin, Cecilia Machado, Katherine Meckel, Chris Mills, Matthew Neidell, Pia Orrenius, Fernanda Marquez-Padilla, Maya Rossin-Slater, Johannes Schneider, Molly Schnell, Emilia Simeonova, David Slusky, Herdis Steingrimsdottir, Reed Walker, Jessica Van Parys, Dan Seltzer |
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 is 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]
Head Start is a program of the United States Department of Health and Human Services that provides comprehensive early childhood education, health, nutrition, and parent involvement services to low-income children and families. It is the oldest and largest program of its kind. The program's services and resources are designed to foster stable family relationships, enhance children's physical and emotional well-being, and establish an environment to develop strong cognitive skills. The transition from preschool to elementary school imposes diverse developmental challenges that include requiring the children to engage successfully with their peers outside the family network, adjust to the space of a classroom, and meet the expectations the school setting provides.
Social mobility is the movement of individuals, families, households or other categories of people within or between social strata in a society. It is a change in social status relative to one's current social location within a given society. This movement occurs between layers or tiers in an open system of social stratification. Open stratification systems are those in which at least some value is given to achieved status characteristics in a society. The movement can be in a downward or upward direction. Markers for social mobility such as education and class, are used to predict, discuss and learn more about an individual or a group's mobility in society.
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.
The social determinants of health (SDOH) are the economic and social conditions that influence individual and group differences in health status. They are the health promoting factors found in one's living and working conditions, rather than individual risk factors that influence the risk or vulnerability for a disease or injury. The distribution of social determinants is often shaped by public policies that reflect prevailing political ideologies of the area.
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.
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.
Dennis J. Snower is an American-German economist, specialising in macroeconomic theory and policy, labor economics, digital governance, social economics, and the psychology of economic decisions in "caring economics".
Anne Catherine Case, Lady Deaton, is an American economist who is currently the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of Economics and Public Affairs, emeritus, at Princeton University.
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.
The number of children in armed conflict zones are around 250 million. They confront physical and mental harms from war experiences.
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.
Sarah Miller is an American health economist currently serving as associate professor of Business Economics and Public Policy in the University of Michigan Ross School of Business. Her research examines the short and long-term effects of health insurance expansions, and the impacts of income on individuals' health and well-being. In 2022, she received the ASHEcon medal, awarded by the American Society of Health Economists to the best health economist under the age of 40.