Krishna Pendakur is a Professor of Economics at Simon Fraser university. He spent the last 18 years studying statistical and econometric issues relating to the measurement of economic discrimination, inequality and poverty. A group of papers (jointly written with Ravi Pendakur) established that visible minorities and Aboriginal people face great disparity in Canadian labour markets, and that this disparity shows no sign of eroding over time. A more recent group of our papers has shown that Aboriginal people face staggeringly poor labour market outcomes. A different set of papers (with other co-authors) establishes that prices, especially shelter prices, matter a lot when we are trying to measure poverty and inequality, and lays out a set of methodologies for measuring these things in the face of price variation. A final group of papers lays out the econometric theory for measuring the cost-of-living and the cost-of-children. Taken together, these papers have advanced our understanding of economic inequality within and across groups in our society, and our understanding of how to adequately measure these things.

Pendakur received a H.B.A. in Sociology and M.A. in Economics from the University of British Columbia in 1989 and 1990 respectively, and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1994.