Joensen, Juanna

Human capital - the skills, knowledge, and health we embody - comprises the bulk of the wealth of nations.  Understanding how human capital inequality emerges is therefore central to understanding income and wealth inequality.  Her research examines how people make consequential choices about education, work, and family formation, and how policies can shape these choices and their consequences.  She quantifies how incentives and circumstances interact with individual endowments and information to shape human capital formation.  Specifically, why financial aid design, school curricula, choice sets, and other financial and non-financial incentives affect behavior so differently across socioeconomic groups, skill levels, and gender.  Her work reveals how policy design, timing, and individual circumstances can either reduce or reinforce human capital and income inequality.

Her personal webpage and research statement provide more background and details on her research.