Anna Aizer

Anna Aizer is a labor and health economist, who currently serves as the Maurice R. Greenberg Professor of Economics at Brown University where she is also a Faculty Associate at the Population Studies and Training Center. Her research focuses on child health and well-being, in particular the effect of societal factors and social issues on children's health.

Biography Aizer received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts, in 1991, a Master of Science at Harvard University in 1995, and a PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2002. She then went on to a postdoctoral fellowship at Princeton University's Center for Research on Child Bearing, before becoming a professor and the chair of the economic department at Brown University where she currently works. Descending from the bad parental health, maternal disadvantage leads to the poor health of the children at birth. From this the authors found that the male children of the accepted applicants lived longer, got more years of schooling, were less likely to be underweight and had higher income than that of the rejected mothers. They found that the exposure to high levels of stress hormone negatively affects the offspring's cognition, health and educational attainment.

Aizer also published an article focusing on adult supervision and child behavior, examining the issue of children spending their school years without adult supervision due to the growth in the number of women entering the workforce and the high cost of child care.

In 2015, Aizer published an article on juvenile incarceration in the Quarterly Journal of Economics with Joseph J. Doyle Jr. In this study, they estimate the effects of juvenile incarceration on the completion of high school and adult recidivism by analyzing the incarceration tendency of randomly assigned judges. Together, they found incarceration of juveniles significantly reduces rates of returning to school while increasing the frequency of juveniles classified as emotionally or behaviorally disordered when juveniles do return to school.

Selected works

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