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12 Facts About Melissa Kearney

1.

Melissa Schettini Kearney was born on 1974 and is an American economist who is the Neil Moskowitz Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

2.

Melissa Kearney is director of the Aspen Economic Strategy Group; a non-resident Senior Fellow at The Brookings Institution; a scholar affiliate and member of the board of the Notre Dame Wilson-Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities ; and a scholar affiliate of the MIT Abdul Jameel Poverty Action Lab.

3.

Melissa Kearney has been an editorial board member of the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy since 2019 and of the Journal of Economic Literature since 2017.

4.

Melissa Kearney received the Wolf Balleisen Memorial Award from for completing her 96-page long senior thesis, titled "The Economic Determinants of Age at First Birth in United States Metropolitan Areas: An Empirical Analysis", under the supervision of Anne Case.

5.

Melissa Kearney then pursued graduate studies with the support of a NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and a Harry S Truman Scholarship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she received a PhD in economics in 2002 after completing a doctoral dissertation, titled "Essays on public policy and consumer choice: applications to welfare reform and state lotteries", under the supervision of Jonathan Gruber and Joshua Angrist.

6.

Melissa Kearney's research focuses on issues related to social policy, poverty, and inequality.

7.

Melissa Kearney has published numerous academic studies related to the economics of families and childbearing, including work on teen childbearing.

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Joshua Angrist
8.

In work with Phillip B Levine, receiving attention in the popular media, Kearney found that greater access to Sesame Street in the show's early days led to improved early educational outcomes for children.

9.

Melissa Kearney has written extensively about income inequality, in both academic journals and policy essays, and has testified before the Congress on the topic of US income inequality.

10.

Melissa Kearney co-authored a 2013 proposal for a Secondary Earner Tax Deduction that formed the basis for a tax proposal included in proposed legislation and in Obama's proposed 2015 budget.

11.

Together with Benjamin H Harris, Kearney co-edited the Hamilton Project book Policies to Address Poverty in America.

12.

Melissa Kearney has served as director of the Aspen Economic Strategy Group since 2017.