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.