Welcoming Janet Currie: A Pioneer in the Economics of Children and Families Joins Yale

Much of Currie’s scholarship sits under a single umbrella—the economics of children and families—but it branches into several lines of inquiry she will continue to push forward at Yale. Her path to becoming a leading public and health economist began with a simple observation about welfare programs. Early in her career, she studied The Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program and found that tracking the effects of small cash transfers was incredibly challenging. This led her to focus on in-kind programs like food stamps (now SNAP) and Medicaid, where the intentionality was clearer and the impacts more measurable. Her current research portfolio approaches child health and wellbeing from a number of angles, including attention to the environment, mental health, and physician decision-making.

Currie’s latest projects track how environmental exposures shape children’s health before they ever reach a classroom. One study exploits the rapid adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) in wealthier neighborhoods—a natural experiment that swaps tailpipe exhaust for cleaner air—to estimate gains in respiratory health for nearby infants and toddlers. Another digs into a darker legacy: soil still laced with lead-arsenate pesticides dumped on pre-war orchards that now sit beneath suburban subdivisions. “Once you map the old tree lines,” she explains, “you can practically draw the boundaries of elevated lead and arsenic in the dirt—and trace the consequences for kids growing up on top of it.”

With teen anxiety and depression surging, Currie is piloting an intervention in Colombia that treats smartphones as a behavioral economics problem, not just a technological one. Focus groups reveal that adolescents routinely log eight hours of screen time a day. The pilot teaches them to audit their own usage, set personalized limits, and tweak notification settings—an approach Currie expects to outperform blanket phone bans that simply push use outside school hours.

She is also building new evidence on school-based health clinics, contrasting schools that embed mental-health services with those that do not. She hypothesizes that on-campus care will draw in students who would otherwise forgo treatment—and, when done well, keep them out of emergency departments down the line.

Currie's work reveals that access to mental health care is only half the battle. “We have two problems,” she says. “One problem is people not being able to get treatment. That's the one that everybody always talks about. The other problem is getting treatment that is just terrible.”

Digging into insurance claims, Currie has documented this quieter crisis: children who do receive care too often get the wrong care, such as dangerous or addictive drugs prescribed off-label drugs for first-episode depression. By following patients over time, her work shows that prescriptions that do not follow professional guidelines are predictive of higher rates of self-harm, hospitalizations, and soaring medical costs. Unpacking the incentives and information frictions that drive such medical decisions has become a third pillar of her agenda.

Currie will channel this research into a new undergraduate course, “The Economics of Children & Families,” structured as a life-cycle tour: fertility choices, in-utero influences, early-childhood investments, K-12 schooling, college and partner matching, and how public policy can amplify—or stifle—opportunity at every stage. “I want students to see how the pieces fit together,” she says, “because small shocks early on can echo for decades. I'm excited about giving the overall area more of a structure.”

That long horizon has also shaped her public-policy outlook. Years of Medicaid studies convinced Currie that health insurance for low-income mothers and kids pays off in higher birth weights, lower childhood mortality, narrower racial gaps in health, and ultimately in healther adults with more engagement in the labor market. Now, as policymakers debate rolling back Medicaid coverage, she sees a painful but necessary task ahead: measuring what happens when safety nets are pulled away, not just when they are put in place.

In joining Yale, Currie will also collaborate with the Tobin Center for Economic Policy—a research center at Yale that aims to shorten the time between research and impact and to influence policy through rigorous social science research. She and Professor Zack Cooper, director of health policy at the Tobin Center, will also be co-directing a new health economics initiative within the Center.

“Professor Currie's career has been a masterclass in how economists can ask and answer questions that matter for public policy,” said Cooper. “I'm overjoyed to have her as a colleague, and I look forward to seeing her work drive even more impact in the years ahead.”

Asked why Yale feels like the right home, Currie answers without hesitation: “There aren’t enough hours in the day to talk with everyone here whose work touches mine—whether it’s environmental economics, public health, or child development. That breadth is rare.” She will also continue to steer the NBER Program on Children and Families, curating conferences and working groups that set national research agendas.

From EV adoption to TikTok scrolls, the forces shaping childhood evolve quickly—but Currie remains optimistic. “Economics gives us the tools to see problems clearly and design better policy. That’s never been more urgent,” she says.

Please join us in welcoming Janet Currie to Yale!