Nicholas Papageorge

Broadus Mitchell Associate Professor of Economics, Johns Hopkins University

Nicholas W. Papageorge is an economist and the Broadus Mitchell Associate Professor of Economics at Johns Hopkins University.  He is also associate director of the Poverty and Inequality Research Lab.

Academic Background

Nicholas Papageorge holds a Ph.D. in Economics from the Washington University in St. Louis. His research focus is on human capital, broadly construed to include education, physical and mental health, socio-emotional skills and genetic endowments. His papers and other ongoing projects focus on several different topics specifically, including the value of pharmaceutical innovation, heterogeneity in the returns to non-cognitive skills, biases in teachers expectations and"role-model effects" and their impacts on racial educational achievement gaps, recent advances in behavioral genetics being used to understand economic inequality, and the unification of qualitative data collection and structural econometrics.  He mainly uses large observational data sets to examine how people invest in their human capital. He also studies variation in the returns to different forms of human capital, for example, by employment sector, racial groups and socioeconomic status.

Research

Rational Responses to Uncertainty - "Ed Shocks"

This mixed methods study examines how beliefs about educational attainment and anticipated adverse shocks (e.g., evictions, incarcerations or deaths of family members, or violence) relate to educational plans and actual attainment for disadvantaged youth.

How Do Teachers Learn Racial Competency From Other Teachers?

This mixed-methods study aims to further understand how teachers improve over time--and specifically how white teachers can increase their racial competency and become more effective teachers to students of color--by bridging three previously distinct literatures in education research: the returns to teaching experience, teacher peer effects, and the impact of same-race teachers.

Current Funding

2019-2022. Russell Sage Foundation. $172,000 for "Rational Responses to Uncertainty? Understanding Disadvantaged Youths' Post-Secondary Educational Choices" (joint with Stefanie DeLuca). 

$40,000 to organize a Levi Symposium to discuss "Genetics and Complex Behaviors: Ethical Issues for Research and Policy" (joint with Jeremy Superman and Kevin Thom) from the Behrman Institute for Bioethics.

$75,000 Catalyst Grant for "Measuring the Variation in the Benefits of Medical Innovation across Sociodemographic Groups" from Johns Hopkins University.

$527,578 for "How Teachers Learn Racial Competency and How to Be Effective for All of their Students" (joint with Seth Gershenson and Constance Lindsay) from the Institute of Education Sciences.

CV

Websites

Contact information

Office: Wyman Park Building 521
Email: papageorge@jhu.edu 
Office Phone: 410-516-4938

Assistant: Kevin LaMonica
Email: klamoni1@jhu.edu

Recent publications

In Press / Forthcoming / Conditionally Accepted / Published Journal Articles:

  1. Health, Risky Behavior and the Value of Medical Innovation for Infectious Disease (with Tat Chan and Barton Hamilton). Review of Economic Studies. [pdf] [Published version]
  2. Who Believes in Me? The Effect of Student-Teacher Demographic Match on Teacher Expectations (with Seth Gershenson and Stephen B. Holt). Economics of Education Review. [IZA Discussion Paper No. 9202] [Published version]
  3. Why Medical Innovation is Valuable: Health, Human Capital and the Labor Market. Quantitative Economics. (Lead Article). [Published version]
  4. Entertaining Malthus: Bread, Circuses and Economic Growth (with Lemin Wu, Rohan Dutta and David Levine). Economic Inquiry. [pdf] [Published Version]
  5. We Should Totally Open a Restaurant: How Optimism and Overconfidence Affect Beliefs (with Stephanie A. Heger). Journal of Economic Psychology. [pdf] [Appendix] [Published version]
  6. The Right Stuff? Personality and Entrepreneurship (with Barton Hamilton and Nidhi Pande). Accepted at Quantitative Economics. [Published Version] (NBER working paper w25006)
  7. Genetic Endowments and Wealth Inequality (with Daniel Barth and Kevin Thom). Forthcoming at Journal of Political Economy. [pdf] (NBER working paper w24642)
  8. Teacher Expectations Matter (with Seth Gershenson and Kyungmin Kang). Forthcoming at Review of Economics and Statistics. [pdf] [Appendix] (NBER working paper w25255)
  9. Genes, Education and Labor Market Outcomes: Evidence from the Health and Retirement Study (with Kevin Thom). Forthcoming at Journal of the European Economic Association. [pdf] (NBER working paper w25114)
  10. Health, Human Capital and Domestic Violence (with Gwyn Pauley, Mardge Cohen, Tracey Wilson, Barton Hamilton and Robert Pollak). Forthcoming at Journal of Human Resources. [pdf] [Appendix] (NBER working paper w22887)

Revise & Resubmit

  1. The Economic Value of Breaking Bad: Misbehavior, Schooling and the Labor Market (with Victor Ronda and Yu Zheng). Revise and Resubmit (Round 2) at Journal of Political Economy. [pdf] (NBER working paper w25602)
  2. The Long-Run Impacts of Same-Race Teachers (with Joshua Hyman, Seth Gershenson, Cassandra M. D. Hart and Constance A. Lindsay). Revise and Resubmit at American Economic Journal – Economic Policy. [pdf] (NBER working paper w25254 and IZA Discussion Paper No. 10630)

Submitted Papers

  1. Positively Aware? Conflicting Expert Reviews and Demand for Medical Treatment (with Jorge Balat and Shaiza Qayyum). [pdf] (NBER working paper 24820)
  2. Innovation and Diffusion of Medical Treatment (with Barton Hamilton, Andres Hincapie and Robert Miller). Submitted. [pdf] [Animated Appendix] (NBER working paper w24577)
  3. Rational Self-Medication (with Michael Darden). [pdf] (NBER working paper 25371)

Work in Progress

  1. Genetic Endowments, Income Dynamics and Wealth Accumulation over the Lifecycle (with Daniel Barth, Kevin Thom and Mateo Velásquez). Draft in preparation.
  2. Genetic Endowments, Health Behaviors and Beliefs about Mortality (with Daniel Barth, Kevin Thom and Prerna Rakheja). Draft in preparation.
  3. Mental Health, Human Capital and Labor Market Outcomes (with Chris J. Cronin and Matthew Forsstrom). Draft in preparation.
  4. Social Determinants of Health and the Value of Medical Innovation (with Barton Hamilton and Andres Hincapie). Draft in preparation.
  5. Instability during Adolescence and Post-Secondary Education Choices: Assessing the Role of Beliefs about Negative Shocks (with Stefanie DeLuca, Seth Gershenson and Andrew Gray). Draft in preparation.

Other Publications, Non-Technical Summaries and Blog Posts

  1. The Power of Teacher Expectations: How Racial Bias Hinders Student Attainment (with Seth Gershenson). Education Next. [Link]
  2. Medical Innovation and the Labor Market: The Importance of Reducing Side Effects. Microeconomic Insights. [Link]
  3. Brookings Blog Posts
    1. Do Teacher Expectations Matter? (with Seth Gershenson). [Link]
    2. What Genetic Information Can Tell Us about Economic Inequality (with Kevin Thom). [Link]
    3. The Economic Value of Breaking Bad: How Misbehavior in School Pays Off for some Kids. [Link]
    4. Don’t Grade Schools on Character Skills. [Link]
  4. VOX EU
    1. Health, Human Capital and Domestic Violence [Link]
    2. The Long-Run Effects of Same-Race Teachers [Link]