Michael Lovenheim is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Policy Analysis and Management at Cornell University. Prior to this, he was a Searle Freedom Trust Post-doctoral Scholar at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research before coming to Cornell. His main areas of work center around empirical issues in the economics of education and local public finance. Recent research has explored the impact of housing wealth variation on higher education decisions of households as well as on fertility decisions, examined the distribution of returns to college quality, analyzed changes in college sector sorting over time across the joint income and ability distribution of students, and examined reasons for increased time to baccalaureate degree and reduced college completion rates in the United States. Some of his current research focuses on identifying the effect of teacher incentive pay on student academic achievement, estimating the impact of teacher experience on student test scores, and detailing the heterogeneous paths students take through college.
Lovenheim received a B.A. (Magna Cum Laude) in Economics from Amherst College in 2000, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Economics both from the University of Michigan in 2005 and 2007 respectively.