Marta Murray-Close is a research economist at the U.S. Census Bureau. Murray-Close received a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan and a M.A. degree in public policy from the University of Minnesota. Murray-Close’s research focuses on the diversity of modern family arrangements with a special interest in the economics of gender and sexual orientation and the economics of nontraditional families. She explores the implications of work-family trade-offs for the personal and professional lives of men and women where heterosexual married couples.
Expert Type: Grantee
Mariana Zerpa
Mariana Zerpa is an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Leuven and a research affiliate at the Institute for the Study of Labor. Her research lies primarily in the intersection of labor and public economics, with applications in health, education, and development economics. One of her main areas of research is human capital accumulation during childhood, and it examines how parental decisions interact with family economic circumstances and welfare and social insurance programs to shape the production of human capital and health during childhood. Another focus of her research is the study of welfare programs and social insurance in developing countries. Zerpa received a Ph.D. in economics at the University of Arizona and a B.A. in economics at Universidad de la República in Uruguay.
Manasi Deshpande
Manasi Deshpande is an assistant professor of economics at the University of Chicago Department of Economics. Her research areas are empirical public finance and labor economics, with a focus on the effects of social insurance and public assistance programs and their interaction with labor markets. She holds a B.A. from The University of Texas at Austin and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Marcus Casey
Marcus Casey is an associate professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he serves as the Director of Undergraduate Studies. He is also a nonresident fellow in economic studies and a scholar affiliate of the Future of Middle Class Initiative at the Brookings Institution. Previously, he was appointed as an inaugural David M. Rubenstein Fellow at Brookings from 2018 – 2020. He is an applied microeconomist whose research program focuses on issues at the intersection of urban, labor, and public economics and economic demography. His work includes topics such as sorting and neighborhood change dynamics; valuation of amenities; spatial and intergenerational aspects of inequality; technology and local labor market dynamics; and education policy. He holds a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a B.A. in economics from Howard University.
Luigi Pistaferri
Luigi Pistaferri is a professor of economics at Stanford University and the Ralph Landau Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic and Policy Research. Pistaferri’s research is mainly on household choices: consumption, saving, portfolio allocation, labor supply, and time use. His papers have appeared in the American Economic Review, Econometrica, the Review of Economic Studies, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Political Economy, the Journal of Economic Perspectives, and the Annual Review of Economics, among others. Pistaferri is also a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Center for Economics and Policy Research, and IZA. From 2012–2017, he was one of the co-editors of the American Economic Review. In 2016, he was elected Fellow of the Econometric Society. His work has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Health, the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, and other organizations. Pistaferri graduated summa cum laude from Instituto Universitario Navale in Naples, Italy, completed a master’s in economics at Bocconi University in Milan, Italy, and a Ph.D. in economics at University College London in 1999.
Magne Mogstad
Magne Mogstad is The Gary S. Becker Distinguished Service Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago. His work is motivated by the broad question of how to address market failures and equalize opportunities, and aims to provide empirical evidence that allows us to test economic theories and inform policymakers. This is made possible by combining theory and credible empirical methods with large administrative datasets that can be linked to supplementary data sources. Mogstad has published extensively in leading scholarly journals. He is the editor of the Journal of Political Economy and the Journal of Public Economics, and he is the recipient of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship and the IZA Young Labor Economist award.
Linh Tô
Linh To is an assistant professor of economics at Boston University. Her focus is on topics in labor, public, and behavioral economics. Her work involves using quasi-experimental methods and administrative datasets as well as experimental methods to understand labor market outcomes, social interactions, and household decisions with an emphasis on the role of information and beliefs and the economics of gender. She received her Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.
Kyle Herkenhoff
Kyle Herkenhoff is an associate professor at the University of Minnesota and a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. He received grants in the past while an employee at the University of Minnesota. He has interests in macroeconomics, applied macroeconomics, and real estate economics. His dissertation research, which was awarded the Welton Prize in Macroeconomics at the University of California, Los Angeles and the Institute of Humane Studies Dissertation Fellowship, looked at the rise of unsecured credit access among the unemployed during the mid-1980s and its role in jobless recoveries. He received his B.A. in business economics from the the University of California, Los Angeles, as well as his M.A. and Ph.D. in economics.
Kristen Harknett
Kristen Harknett is an associate professor of sociology at the University of California, San Francisco. Her research interests include economic influences on marriage, co-habitation, and childbearing; the causes and consequences of lacking material and emotional support from friends and family; and the influence of sex ratio imbalances and other aspects of social context on romantic relationships and childbearing. She received her Ph.D. in sociology and demography from Princeton University.
Kristin Smith
Kristin Smith is a visiting research associate professor at Dartmouth College. Her research focus is on gender inequality, labor markets and employment, and work and family policy. She has researched labor force issues, including gender differences in job tenure and shifting determinants of women’s labor supply and the consequences of those shifts. In addition, Smith has studied occupational variation in earnings, job retention, and job flexibility, principally focused on care workers and more recently on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, or STEM, workers. Smith also studies family policy, including paid family and medical leave, examining inequity in access and impacts on labor supply decisions. Smith’s expertise lies in examining trends in how work and family life interconnect, developing workforce policy recommendations, and applying a gender lens to her analysis. She has a broad background in demography and sociology, has extensive experience in survey design and implementation, and is proficient at quantitative data analysis of cross-sectional and longitudinal data. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Maryland, an M.P.H. from Tulane University, and a B.A. from the University of Vermont.