Research Opportunities and Support for Dissertations Available

Prof. James Heckman has resources available to support graduate student research on any of the following topics . Theoretical Both theoretical and empirical studies will be supported. The topics that can be supported are very diverse, and include the following:

1. Intergenerational models of family influence and child preference formation .
2. Studies of the origins and dynamics of human inequality and public policies to alleviate inequality .
3. Models of cognitive and noncognitive skills: their effects and their determination .
4. Studies of the origins of the socioeconomic gradient in health, and the evolution of health status, and the dynamic relationships among health, cognitive skills, and noncognitive skills.
5. Studies of the design and analysis of social experiments and field experiments and the integration of experiments with structural economic models.
6. Reanalysis of older experimental data on early childhood interventions using novel empirical methods .
7. Understanding the dropout problem in America and the problem of the slowdown in the growth of skills in the American economy.
8. Economics economics of education, with an emphasis on the technology of skill formation.
9. Econometric and statistical analysis analyses of longitudinal data and human growth curves .

For background on existing research on these topics, see http://jenni.uchicago.edu/human-inequality .

The current group currently working on this array of topics has compiled a rich collection of longitudinal data sets on life cycles of children and parents. Many data sets are unique. Affiliated students working on these projects gain access to the data along with programming assistance. The best arrangement is for students to initially work on joint projects with a large and productive group and to carve out independent topics for Ph.D. theses. Other arrangements are possible, however. Compensation and fellowship support is competitive. Training in research skills and participation in national conferences is a fringe benefit. Job placement of previous participants has been at top schools. Recent graduates of this work group have landed jobs at top schools (such as Columbia University, Northwestern University, University College London, and University of Pennsylvania).

Contact Alison Baulos ( awb143@uchicago.edu ) for additional information or to apply.