Sojourner is Senior Economist at the W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. He was formerly associate professor at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management. His research focuses on 1) effects of labor-market institutions, 2) policies to promote efficient and equitable development of human capital with a focus on early childhood and K-12 education systems, and 3) behavioral economic approaches to consumer finance decisions.
Fan Wang is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Houston. His areas of expertise are development economics, applied microeconomics, and labor. His research focuses on issues related to financial access and human capital formation in developing economies. Some of his recent work looks at the impact of formal credit market expansion on physical and human capital accumulation in Thailand. He is also studying the importance of financial and informational constraints in explaining the heterogeneity in early childhood human capital accumulation.
Youngmin Park is a Senior Economist at the Bank of Canada. He is interested in identifying potential inefficiencies associated with differential human capital investment across families and designing policies to mitigate them. He is also interested in understanding market forces that shift returns to acquired human capital and change wage inequality over time.
Park received his Ph.D. from the University of Western Ontario in 2016.
Kyle Herkenhoff is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Minnesota and visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. He received his Ph.D. from UCLA in 2014, and his research, which focuses on the interaction of labor markets and consumer credit markets, places equal weight on theory and empirics.
Christopher is an Assistant Professor at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge, and a Research Affiliate at CEPR. He works with complex datasets and applied methodologies, including machine learning and structural modelling. In a range of projects, he analyzes primary data collected using self-designed surveys in order to study perceived returns to human capital investments. Differences in beliefs can affect important decisions such as how much to invest into ones children, whether to attend university, or whether to work as a parent.
Elena Pastorino is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Minnesota. Her research interests are in the area of Labor Economics and Development Economics. Her research focuses on the determinants of individual careers in firms and in the labor market, on the importance of human capital and borrowing constraints for aggregate unemployment, and on the role of uncertainty and firm market power in labor and output markets in developed and developing countries.
Rong Hai is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Miami. She was previously a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Center for the Economics of Human Development and Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics at University of Chicago from 2013 to 2016.. Her research interests are Public Economics, Labor Economics, Health Economics, and Household Finance.
Hai received a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2013.
Ronni Pavan is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Rochester. His research focuses on labor economics, economics of education and urban economics. In particular, he has worked on the relationship between wages and city size. In a separate line of research, he has worked on human capital specificity and acquisition, mainly through occupational choice, major choice and parental investments. He was a member of the Economics Department at Royal Holloway, University of London from 2013 until 2015 before going back to Rochester in 2015.
Oksana Leukhina is a macro/growth economist. Within these broad areas, she is interested in topics that overlap with labor and financial economics.
She has contributed to the study of the long-run process of economic development, structural transformation, demographic change and family labor supply. Most recently, Leukhina is interested in questions pertaining to human capital accumulation at college level, working to quantify the amount of uncertainty and returns to college that various students face.
Martha Bailey is a Professor of Economics and a Research Professor at the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan. She is also a Faculty Research Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Prior to joining the University of Michigan economics faculty, she was a scholar in the Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Program. She has served on the editorial board at the Journal of Economic History and currently serves on the board of editors at the Journal of Economic Literature and Demography.
