Dr. Nathaniel Hendren is a Professor of Economics at Harvard University. He earned a B.S. in mathematics and economics from the University of Chicago (2005), and a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2012). He is a founder and co-director of Policy Impacts, an organization dedicated to improving the quality of government decision-making and evidence-based policy-making. He is also a founder and co-director of Opportunity Insights, which is dedicated to identifying barriers to economic opportunity and developing scalable solutions that will empower people throughout the United States to rise out of poverty and achieve better life outcomes.
Additionally, Dr. Hendren has been awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) in 2019 and a Sloan Fellowship in 2016. He is the lead co-editor of the Journal of Public Economics and Associate Editor at American Economic Review: Insights.
Dr. Hendren's academic work:
1) Seeks to understand how we can expand economic opportunity.
2) Quantifies lack of economic mobility and economic opportunity for those of different backgrounds.
3) Aims to uncover why private markets fail to provide economic opportunity in settings ranging from insurance markets to investments in children's education.
4) Aims to provide new tools to evaluate the effectiveness of government policies aimed at expanding opportunity and improving societal well-being.
Student Lecture, 2 March 2023
Social Mobility and Investments in Children
Upward economic mobility has declined dramatically in the last half-century in the US. Why? What should we do about it? We discuss the unique role of exposure to better childhood environments and discuss the implications for the government policies that are most effective at improving upward mobility.
Faculty Seminar, 3 March 2023
The Radius of Economic Opportunity: Evidence from Migration and Local Labor Markets
We examine the geographic incidence of local labor market growth across locations of childhood residence. We ask: when wages grow in a given US labor market, do the benefits flow to individuals growing up in nearby or distant locations? We begin by constructing new statistics on migration rates across labor markets between childhood and young adulthood. This migration matrix shows 80% of young adults migrate less than 100 miles from where they grew up. 90% migrate less than 500 miles. Migration distances are shorter for Black and Hispanic individuals and for those from low-income families. These migration patterns provide information on the first order geographic incidence of local wage growth. Next, we explore the responsiveness of location choices to economic shocks. Using geographic variation induced by the recovery from the Great Recession, we estimate the elasticity of migration with respect to increases in local labor market wage growth. We develop and implement a novel test for validating whether our identifying wage variation is driven by changes in labor market opportunities rather than changes in worker composition due to sorting. We find that higher wages lead to increased in-migration, decreased out-migration and a partial capitalization of wage increases into local prices. Our results imply that for a 2 rank point increase in annual wages (approximately $1600) in a given commuting zone (CZ), approximately 99% of wage gains flow to those who would have resided in the CZ in the absence of the wage change. The geographically concentrated nature of most migration and the small magnitude of these migration elasticities suggest that the incidence of labor market conditions across childhood residences is highly local. For many individuals, the “radius of economic opportunity” is quite narrow.