Department of Economics

Professor Wolpin has been at Penn since 1995. His research focuses on the labor market and demographic decisions of households and individuals in dynamic settings. In recent work, he has studied (i) the role of public welfare and marriage markets in accounting for race differences in education, marriage, fertility and labor supply of women; (ii) the importance of technological change in explaining the increase in the college premium and in the male-female wage gap; (iii) the effect of borrowing constraints on college attendance and (iv) the importance of home inputs in accounting for race differences in cognitive achievement. The methodological approach he has adopted recognizes the critical interplay between economic theory, data and econometrics.

Professor Todd is also a Research Associate of Penn’s Population Studies Center. She serves as an Associate Editor for the American Economic Review and the Journal of Human Capital.

Her main fields of research are social program evaluation, labor economics, and microeconometrics. She has published papers on the determinants of cognitive achievement, testing for discrimination in motor vehicle searches, sources of racial wage disparities, and methods for evaluating and optimally designing conditional cash transfer programs.

She is currently working on implementing a large-scale randomized school incentive program in Mexican high schools, on analyzing the effects of school vouchers in Chile and on assessing the effects of government regulation on the operation of the privatized pension market in Chile.

Professor Tang’s received his PhD from Northwestern University and has taught here at Penn since 2008. His research focuses on the robust econometric inference of economic models about agents’ behavior in environments with or without strategic interactions. Empirical researchers are mainly interested in two (logically sequential) questions as they try to link economic models with observed data. First, does the theoretical model imply any restrictions on agents’ behavior observable to empirical researchers? Second, given data consistent with a certain class of models, can researchers use the observed data alone to fully recover the unknown primitives of the model? Answers to the first question shed lights on the falsifiability (testability) of an economic model, and help researchers decide whether a certain model is fit for explaining the observed data and predicting future outcomes. Answers to the second question are important if researchers are interested in backing out the unknown structural parameters for the purposing of inferring counterfactual policy implications. A unifying theme of his research is to address these two questions for various economic models while trying to employ as few exogenous form restrictions on model primitives as possible.

Professor Sieg is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and at Penn’s Population Studies Center. He currently serves on the Board of Editors at the American Economic Review and the International Economic Review. He has published extensively on topics related to public finance and the economics of education and urban policy. 

Camilo Garcia-Jimeno received his PhD from MIT in 2011 and joined Penn this fall. His research focuses on political economy, economic history, theory and econometrics.

Professor Fieler received her PhD from New York University and has been here at Penn since 2009. She is also a member of the International Growth Centre (IGC) Trade Program. 

Professor Fang is an applied microeconomist with broad theoretical and empirical interests focusing on public economics. His research covers topics ranging from discrimination, social economics, welfare reform, psychology and economics, to public good provision mechanisms, auctions and health insurance markets. He is currently working on issues related to insurance markets, particularly life insurance and health insurance markets, and issues related to discrimination and affirmative action. He serves as a co-editor of the Journal of Public Economics and the International Economic Review, as well as the editorial board of several other journals, including the American Economic Review.

Professor Fang received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania in 2000. Before joining the Penn faculty, he held positions at Yale University and Duke University. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Penn Population Studies Center.

Professor de Paula received his PhD from Princeton University and has taught here at Penn since 2005. He is also a research associate at Penn’s Population Studies Center. He is an applied econometrician with strong interests in both empirical applications and methodological questions. His research is on the intersection of applied economic theory, econometrics and empirical microeconomics, with particular emphasis on issues that arise as one attempts to take policy-relevant economic models to data. The questions he investigates are either related to methodological aspects (identification and estimation, especially in duration and empirical games models) or empirical applications around microeconomic environments (mostly in problems found in developing nations such as tax avoidance, undocumented migration and the relation between sexual behavior and AIDS).

Professor Behrman is also a Research Associate at Penn’s Population Studies Center and he serves as the Economics/Social Science member of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)/National Institute of Child Health and Development (NICHD) National Advisory Council. He is a leading international researcher in empirical microeconomics, with emphasis on developing economies.  His research interests include empirical microeconomics, labor economics, human resources (early childhood development, education, health, nutrition), project evaluation, economic demography, incentive systems and household behaviors. The unifying dimension of much of this research is to improve empirical knowledge of the determinants of and the impacts of human resources given unobserved factors such as innate health and ability, the functioning of various institutions such as households and imperfect markets, and information imperfections.

He has published over 350 professional articles (primarily in leading general and field economic journals, also in leading demographic, sociology, nutritional and biomedical journals) and thirty-three books.  He has been a researcher with the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, United Nations Development Program, other international organizations and various governments.

He has been a principal investigator on over seventy research projects funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (twenty-three grants), U.S. National Science Foundation (thirteen grants), and a number of other governmental and foundation sources.  He has been involved in professional research or lecturing in over forty countries.

He has received honors including: Fulbright 40th Anniversary Distinguished Fellow, Econometric Society Fellow, Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, Ford Foundation Fellow and 2008 biennial Carlos Diaz-Alejandro Prize for outstanding research contributions to Latin America.

Professor Cunha received his PhD from the University of Chicago and has taught here at Penn since 2007. He is also a research associate at Penn’s Population Studies Center. His research focuses on the causes and consequences of inequality and poverty. His interest is in the quantification of degree to which labor income inequality is the result of the preexisting heterogeneity present across workers before they enter the labor market and how much is due to labor market shocks. The findings suggest that at least 50% of lifetime labor income inequality is determined by preexisting heterogeneity. He is also studying the importance of investments in cognitive and noncognitive skills in explaining the heterogeneity that determines labor market inequality. His research on Human Development estimates that earlier investments in human capital are very important in producing cognitive skills while ater investments in human capital are very important in producing noncognitive skills.