Jeanne Lafortune | |
---|---|
Nationality | Canadian, Chile (Permanent resident) |
Education | B.A. in Economics (Honors) & Minor in International Development M.A. in Economics Ph.D. in Economics |
Alma mater | McGill University University of Toronto Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
Occupation | Associate Professor & Director of Research at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile |
Website | https://sites.google.com/site/jeannelafortune/ |
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. [1] [2] [3] She is also a researcher at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL LAC), which is a global research center that aims to reduce poverty and improve life quality of people in the Caribbean and Latin America. [4] 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. [3] [1] [2]
Lafortune graduated with a B.A. in economics (with honors) and Minor in International Development from McGill University in 2002. She then received her M.A. in economics from the University of Toronto in 2003. She further pursued her studies and earned her Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2008, where she wrote her final dissertation "Essays on Matching, Marriage and Human Capital Accumulation". [1] She also served for the Government of Canada as an economist at the Economic Studies and Policy Analysis Division for the Department of Finance from 2003 to 2004. [1]
Lafortune's research focus revolves around three fields: [2]
“Baby Commodity-Booms? The Impact of Commodity Shocks on Fertility Decisions and Outcomes"
In this research paper, Lafortune collaborates with Francisco Gallego to analyze how economic booms impact fertility rates of families in small, emerging, and open economies. Drawing from previous works on the topic, Lafortune re-evaluates empirical data that suggests a positive relationship between economic prosperity and birth rates and its relationship to family formation variance [5] while there is limited evidence regarding the relationship between births and worse health outcomes of infants. For instance, the authors found that the birth rate increases during economically prosperous periods, but this is due to the expansion of families formed before the boom rather than the creation of new families during these periods. [5] The opportunity costs faced by women to choose to have or not to have children are influenced by public policy. Additionally, the opportunity costs are different among women starting a family and women having more children, a present gap in previous literature. For example, for first-time mothers, an improvement in economic opportunities might reduce their desire to have a child since it interrupts their work life, however women who already have a child are less likely to be working and appear to be in favour of expanding their existing family during better economic conditions. In the future, Lafortune and Gallego suggest research to focus on the impact of fatherhood on their assessments. [5]
"Marry for What? Caste and Mate Selection in Modern India"
Lafortune writes this paper in collaboration with economists Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Maitreesh Ghatak for the American Economic Journal. The study focuses on the influence caste systems have on marriage decisions among men and women in India, over economic differentials. [6] This question is relevant since it accounts for “status”-like attributes (caste) that are missing in the literature of marriage economics, suggesting that economic reasons are the main influence regarding marriage choices in India and other developing countries. Lafortune and her colleagues found that caste is highly valued by Indians who are looking to get married. [6] Yet, data suggests that this trend might be changing in the future as 30 percent of people in the sample married outside their caste (a trade-off between caste and higher economic status, education, and/or beauty). Control variables include age, education, wage, location, family origins, and height. Additionally, the next generation of the respondents will eventually marry through a channel of friends and family networks instead of ads. The authors conclude that caste preference has not been undermined by economic forces, but the changing trends on these preferences should be analyzed further. [6]
Lafortune started as an assistant professor at the University of Maryland College of Behavioral and Social Sciences in the U.S. from 2008 to 2012. She worked in the Department of Economics at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile (UC) as an assistant professor from 2010 to 2015, where she later became associate professor in 2015. [3] [1] [2] Along her teaching experience, she has taught economics courses at both undergraduate and graduate level.
On May 27, 2022, she was promoted to full professorship of Economics at UC in Chile. [1] [2]
Course | Undergraduate | Graduate |
---|---|---|
Intermediate Microeconomic Analysis | • ECON326 | |
Topics in Economic Development | • | ECON616 |
Course | Undergraduate | Graduate |
---|---|---|
Intermediate Microeconomics | • EAE210B | |
Topics in Economic Development | • EAE3975 | |
Topics in Applied Econometrics | • EAE3512 |
Sendhil Mullainathan is an American professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a professor of Computation and Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business from 2018-2024. He is the author of Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. He was hired with tenure by Harvard in 2004 after having spent six years at MIT.
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."
Esther Duflo, FBA is a French-American economist currently serving as the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Poverty Alleviation and Development Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 2019, she was jointly awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences alongside Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer "for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty".
The Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) is a global research center based at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology aimed to reducing poverty by ensuring that policy is informed by rigorous, scientific evidence. J-PAL funds, provides technical support to, and disseminates the results of randomized controlled trials evaluating the efficacy of social interventions in health, education, agriculture, and a range of other fields. As of 2020, the J-PAL network consisted of 500 researchers and 400 staff, and the organization's programs had impacted over 400 million people globally. The organization has regional offices in seven countries around the world, and is headquartered near the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty (2011) is a non-fiction book by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo, both professors of Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences laureates. The book reports on the effectiveness of solutions to global poverty using an evidence-based randomized control trial approach. It won the 2011 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.
Amy Nadya Finkelstein is an American economist who is a professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the co-director and research associate of the Public Economics Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the co-Scientific Director of J-PAL North America. She was awarded the 2012 John Bates Clark Medal for her contributions to economics. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and won a MacArthur "Genius" fellowship in 2018.
Robin Burgess is a British economist who is Professor of Economics, Co-founder and Director of the International Growth Centre, as well as Co-Founder and Director of the Economics of Energy and the Environment (EEE) program at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Marianne Bertrand is a Belgian economist who currently works as Chris P. Dialynas Distinguished Service Professor of Economics and Willard Graham Faculty Scholar at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. Bertrand belongs to the world's most prominent labour economists in terms of research, and has been awarded the 2004 Elaine Bennett Research Prize and the 2012 Sherwin Rosen Prize for Outstanding Contributions in the Field of Labor Economics. She is a research fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and the IZA Institute of Labor Economics.
Erica Marie Field is an economist who currently works as a James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of economics at Duke University. Her research interests include development economics, labour economics, and health economics. In 2010, her research was awarded the Elaine Bennett Research Prize.
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.
Rema Hanna is an economist and is the Jeffrey Cheah Professor of South East Asia Studies at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. Moreover, she currently serves as co-director of the Evidence for Policy Design (EPoD) research programme at Harvard's Center for International Development and a scientific co-director for Southeast Asia at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL). Her research focuses on the efficiency and effectiveness of public services in developing countries, with specific focus on service delivery and the impacts of corruption. She is also the co-chair of the editorial board for the academic journal Review of Economics and Statistics.
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.
Murat Iyigun is an American and Turkish scholar and author in the field of the economics of family, economic development, political economy and cliometrics. He is a professor at the University of Colorado.
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.
Catherine D. Wolfram is an American micro-economist, academic, and researcher who is the William Barton Rogers Professor in Energy and a Professor of Applied Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Previously, she served as a Cora Jane Flood Professor of Business Administration and associate dean for academic affairs at the Haas School of Business at University of California, Berkeley where she also served as a faculty director of The E2e Project and as scientific director for energy and the environment at Center for Effective Global Action. She also directed the National Bureau of Economic Research's Environment and Energy Economics Program.
Marcella Alsan is an American physician and economist at Harvard University. She is known for her works in the field of health inequality and development economics. She is currently a professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and was previously an associate professor of medicine at Stanford University. She uses randomized evaluations and historical public health natural experiments to study how infectious disease, human capital, and economic outcomes interact. She has studied the effects of the Tuskegee Syphills Experiment on health care utilization and mortality among Black men. Alsan was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2021.
Emily Louise Breza is an American development economist currently serving as the Frederic E. Abbe Professor of Economics at Harvard University. She is a board member at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, and an affiliated researcher at the International Growth Centre and National Bureau of Economic Research. Breza's primary research interests are in development economics, in particular the interplay between social networks and household finance. She is the recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship.
Alessandra Voena is an Italian development and labor economist currently serving as Professor of Economics at Stanford University. Her research focuses on the economics of the family, in addition to the study of science and innovation. Voena is an elected fellow of the Econometric Society, and is the recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship. In 2017, she received the Carlo Alberto Medal, awarded biennially by the Collegio Carlo Alberto to the best Italian economist under the age of 40.
Vincent Pons is a French economist who is the Michael B. Kim Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. Pons's research focuses on questions in political economy and development economics.