The 16th International Symposium on Human Capital and Labor Markets Celebrating the Release of the China Human Capital (CHLR) Report 2024
Keynote Speaker Intoduction
Dr. Petra E. Todd
EDMUND J. AND LOUISE W. KAHN TERM PROFESSOR OF ECONOMICS
Chair, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania
Professor Todd is also a Research Associate of Penn’s Population Studies Center, NBER, and IZA. She serves on the editorial board of the International Economic Review and the Econometrics Journal. She is a fellow of the Econometrics Society and of the Society of Labor Economists (SOLE).
Her main fields of research are social program evaluation, labor economics, and microeconometrics. She has published papers on econometric methods for evaluating the effects of program/policy interventions, the determinants of cognitive achievement, testing for discrimination in motor vehicle searches, sources of racial and gender labor market disparities, pension program design and on conditional cash transfer programs.
She is currently working on projects analyzing the effects of personality traits on gender labor market disparities, evaluating the effects of grade retention in Portugal, analyzing the effects of local minimum wage policies in the US, and analyzing the effects of a nationwide preschool reform in Mexico.
Selected Publications
• "Matching as an Econometric Evaluation Estimator: Evidence from Evaluating a Job Training Programme" (with J. Heckman and H. Ichimura), Review of Economic Studies, Vol. 64 (4), October, 1997. This paper presents important insights into using matching methods for evaluating the effectiveness of job training programs.
• "Racial Bias in Motor Vehicle Searches: Theory and Evidence" (with John Knowles and Nicola Persico), Journal of Political Economy, February, 2001. The research investigates the presence of racial discrimination in motor vehicle searches.
• "Legal Activism, Private Philanthropy, and the Schooling of Southern Blacks, 1910 - 1960" (with James Heckman and John Donohue), in Quarterly Journal of Economics, February, 2002. Explores the factors that influenced the education of Southern Blacks in the early 20th century.
• "On the Specification and Estimation of the Production Function for Cognitive Achievement" (with Kenneth I. Wolpin), Economic Journal, Feb., 2003. Focuses on the factors determining cognitive achievement and the appropriate econometric methods for its analysis.
• "Identification and Estimation of Treatment Effects with a Regression-Discontinuity Design" (with Jin Yong Hahn and Wilbert van der Klauw), Econometrica, 2001. This work is significant in the field of causal inference using the regression discontinuity design.