Marianne Bertrand, Chris P. Dialynas Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at Booth School of Business, will direct the new University of Chicago Poverty Lab. According to a press release on the The University of Chicago’s website, The Poverty Lab is one of three new urban labs the University of Chicago announced. This lab joins the Ecology and Wellness Labs as part of a University of Chicago network that builds on the success of the school’s Crime and Education Labs.
The Poverty Lab’s mission will be to seek ways to improve parenting skills and better prepare students for the job market. In each lab, staff members and students conduct research, formulate strategies for tackling problems, work with community groups to operate programs, then evaluate data to assess impact. By summer, the labs will be operating out of workspace in the Loop.
“It’s marrying rigorous inquiry with impact on the largest scale,” Timothy Knowles, director of the urban labs, said.
Other than directing this new lab, Professor Bertrand is an applied micro-economist whose research covers the fields of labor economics, corporate finance, and development economics, according to her bio on the Booth website. Her research in these areas has been published widely, including numerous research articles in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Political Economy, the American Economic Review, and the Journal of Finance. She is also a member of the Faculty Advisory Board for the University of Chicago’s Collegium for Culture and Society, as well as of the Board of Directors for the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab. Professor Bertrand also serves as co-editor of the American Economic Review.
Bertrand has received several awards and honors, including the 2004 Elaine Bennett Research Prize, awarded by the American Economic Association to recognize and honor outstanding research in any field of economics by a woman at the beginning of her career, and the 2012 Society of Labor Economists’ Rosen Prize for Outstanding Contributions to Labor Economics. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.