Jessica Pan

Jessica Pan is a Singaporean economist currently serving as professor of economics at the National University of Singapore. Her research focuses on applied topics in labor economics, especially related to gender, migration, discrimination, and the returns of education.

Early life and education Pan was born in Singapore, She received a BA in economics from the University of Chicago in 2005, followed by an MBA and PhD from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business in 2010. Her thesis examined the role of women in labor markets in the United States and Hong Kong, and was supervised by David Autor, Marianne Bertrand, Kerwin Charles, Patricia Cortés, and Jonathan Guryan.

Academic career After completing her PhD, Pan joined the National University of Singapore as an assistant professor, where she is currently a professor of economics, Dean of the Graduate School, and Vice Provost for Graduate Education.

In addition to her academic appointments, Pan is affiliated with the Centre for Economic Policy Research

In 2020, she was elected a fellow of the Econometric Society. Pan shows that there are few marriages in which women earn more than their husbands, with divorce rates increasing when women begin to earn more. She also shows that when women earn more, they are more likely to take up household chores, even though their opportunity cost of doing so is higher. Pan and co-authors show that "sexism", as measured by an index of questions asked in the General Social Survey, varies considerably across US states, and adversely affects women's labor market outcomes where they currently reside. To achieve this, she leverages plausibly exogenous variation in migration patterns resulting from settlement patterns of past waves of migrants and the physical distance between different labor markets. Pan shows that there exists a large divide between the social and behavioral outcomes of boys and girls brought up in single-parent homes. By the age of 10–11, Pan shows that boys in single-parent households are much more likely to get suspended than their female counterparts. This is despite little effect of early school environment on subsequent non-cognitive gaps between girls and boys.

Selected publications