7th Urbanization and Poverty Reduction Research Conference

Harris Selod is a Senior Economist with the Development Research Group of the World Bank. His current research focuses on urban development, including on issues related to transport and land use, as well as land tenure, land markets and the political economy of the land sector in developing countries. His publications cover a variety of topics in urban and public economics including theories of squatting and residential informality, the political economy of transport infrastructure, the effects of residential segregation on schooling and unemployment, or the impact of land rights formalization and place-based policies. He has published in major academic journals including the American Economic Journal, the Journal of Public Economics, the Economic Journal, the Journal of Applied Econometrics, the Journal of Urban Economics and the Journal of Development Economics. He is the co-author of the recently published World Bank flagship report “Land Matters” and a co-founder and co-organizer of the World Bank-GWU Urbanization and Poverty Reduction Research Conference. Prior to joining the World Bank, he held various positions as tenured researcher at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research, Associate Professor at the Paris School of Economics, and technical international expert for the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Rémi Jedwab is an associate professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Elliott School and the Department of Economics of George Washington University, the Director of the Institute for International Economic Policy and the Director of the ESIA Initiative on Climate Change and Sustainable Cities at George Washington University, and an Affiliated Scholar of the Marron Institute of Urban Management at New York University. Professor Jedwab's main fields of research are urban and real estate economics, development and growth, environmental economics, and labor economics. Some of the issues he has studied include urbanization and structural transformation, urban construction and climate change, the economic determinants and effects of transportation infrastructure, and the roles of institutions, human capital and technology in development and growth. He is the co-founder and co-organizer of the World Bank-GWU Urbanization and Poverty Reduction Conference and the Washington Area Development Economics Symposium.

Victoria Delbridge is the Head of the International Growth Centre’s Cities that Work initiative. She is working with Paul Collier, Ed Glaeser, and Tony Venables, to develop a network of economists, urban planning practitioners and policymakers to translate economic research into clear urban policy guidance. Victoria holds an MSc in Economics for Development from the University of Oxford, and a BSc in Environmental and Geographical Science and Economics from the University of Cape Town. Prior to her Masters at Oxford, Victoria was an economist at the Western Cape Department of Economic Development and Tourism in South Africa. Her current research areas include urban land use planning, public infrastructure and service provision, urban employment, municipal finance and city-level data strategies.

Oliver Harman is a Cities Economist for the International Growth Centre's (IGC) Cities that Work initiative based at Blavatnik School of Government, University of Oxford and Associate Staff at London School of Economics. He is also a Clarendon Scholar in Sustainable Urban Development researching decentralisation in low income and fast growing cities. In these roles he attempts to help bridge the gap between research and policy, both generating and translating economic literature into clear urban policy guidance for emerging country city governments.

Oliver engages with local government Ministries and Mayoral teams primarily across West, Central and East Africa as well as South Asia. Examples include local government reform in Guyana, urban resilience and waste management in Ghana, municipal finance in Malawi, Senegal, Somaliland and sustainable urbanisation in Bangladesh. His three thematic interests include sustainable urban development, global value chains for regional upgrading and urban economics.

Tanner Regan is an Assistant Professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Elliott School and the Department of Economics at George Washington University. He holds a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics, and M.A. and B.Sc. degrees from the University of Toronto. His main fields of research are urban and development economics, including issues related to housing, land tenure, urban planning, and property tax in developing country cities.

He is the Milton Friedman Professor of Economics and Director of the interdisciplinary Energy Policy Institute at Chicago. His other current positions and affiliations include Elected Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Editor of the Journal of Political Economy, Faculty Director of the E2e Project, Head of the JPAL Environment and Energy Program, and Nonresident Senior Fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution. Prior to rejoining the faculty at Chicago, Professor Greenstone was the 3M Professor of Environmental Economics at MIT.

Greenstone’s research estimates the costs and benefits of environmental quality and society’s energy choices. He has worked extensively on the Clean Air Act and examined its impacts on air quality, manufacturing activity, housing prices, and human health to assess its benefits and costs. He is currently engaged in large‐scale projects to estimate the economic costs of climate change and to identify efficient approaches to mitigating these costs.

His research is increasingly focused on developing countries. This work includes an influential paper that demonstrated that high levels of particulates air pollution from coal combustion are causing the 500 million residents of Northern China to lose more than 2.5 billion years of life expectancy. He is also engaged in projects with the Government of India and four Indian state governments that use randomized control trials to test innovative ways to improve the functioning of environmental regulations and increase energy access.

Greenstone also has extensive policy experience.   He served as the Chief Economist for President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2009‐10.   In addition, he was the Director of the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution, which studies a range of policies to promote broad‐based economic growth from, 2010‐2013 and has since joined its Advisory Council.

Manuel A. Alculete Lopes de Araújo has been the Mayor of Quelimane since 2011. Mr. de Araújo’s extensive experience spans civil society, academics, business and politics, and is deeply involved in advocate for issues linked to urban and climate change. He plays a key role within institutions such as UCLG as well as ICLEI, where he is a member of the Global Executive Committee and Global Co-Chair for Resilience. In 2019, Araújo was elected Deputy Chair of the National Council of the Mozambican Mayors Association (ANAMM) Congress. Araújo holds a PhD from the University of East Anglia, and an MSc from SOAS, University of London.

He lectured in Economics, Development Economics, International Relations and Comparative Foreign Policy at Catholic University of Mozambique, Pedagogic University, the Instituto Superior de Ciencias e Tecnologias de Mocambique, Universidade A Politecnica and the Instituto Superior de Relacoes Internacionais

Mr Emmanuel Clottey is Technical Advisor on Urbanisation and Climate Change to the Regional Minister of Greater Accra. He has a rich history in local and regional government in Ghana, formerly Chairman of the Finance & Administration Sub-Committee of Accra Metropolitan Assembly, Executive Assistant to the Mayor and Smart City Coordinator for Accra. His training is in Engineering, Public Administration and International Politics.

Maureen Cropper is a Distinguished University Professor at the Department of Economics at the University of Maryland at College Park. She is an environmental economist whose research has examined the links between air pollution and the risks of chronic illness and mortality, the impact of climate change on migration, and the role of collective action in pandemic flu control. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a senior fellow at Resources for the Future, a past president of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, and a past chair of the Environmental Economics Advisory Committee of the Science Advisory Board at the Environmental Protection Agency. She received her B.A. in economics from Bryn Mawr and her Ph.D. from Cornell University.

Indermit Gill is Chief Economist of the World Bank Group and Senior Vice President for Development Economics. He brings to the role a broad combination of leadership, expertise, and practical experience working with governments on macroeconomic imbalances, growth, poverty, institutions, conflict, and climate change.

Before starting this position on September 1, 2022, Gill served as the World Bank’s Vice President for Equitable Growth, Finance, and Institutions, where he played a key role in shaping the Bank’s response to the extraordinary series of shocks that have hit developing economies since 2020. Between 2016 and 2021, he was a professor of public policy at Duke University and non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Global Economy and Development program.

Gill is widely regarded for his contributions to development economics. He spearheaded the influential 2009 World Development Report on economic geography. His pioneering work includes introducing the concept of the “middle-income trap” to describe how countries stagnate after reaching a certain level of income. He has published extensively on key policy issues facing developing countries—among other things, sovereign debt vulnerabilities, green growth and natural-resource wealth, labor markets, and poverty and inequality.

Ed Glaeser is a Research Programme Director for the IGC’s Cities Research Programme. He is the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard University, where he also serves as Director of the Taubman Center for State and Local Government and the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston. He also edits The Quarterly Journal of Economics. He studies the economics of cities, and has written several papers on urban issues, including the growth of cities, segregation, crime and housing markets. He is particularly interested in the role that geographic proximity can play in creating knowlegde and innovation.  He received his BA in Economics from Princeton University and his PhD from the University of Chicago (1992).

In 2011, Glaeser published a book, Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier which was shortlisted for the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award.

Muhammad Omar Masud is the CEO of the Urban Unit and a member of the Pakistan Administrative Service. Previously, he served as the Government of Punjab’s Additional Secretary of Finance. He holds a master’s degree in public policy from Princeton University and a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in urban policy.

Jennifer Musisi is a Senior Advisor at the IGC. She is an experienced lawyer and public administrator in Uganda, and has been Executive Director of the Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA) since 2011. She has been at the head of the transformation of the City Administration from a Local Government to a Corporate Entity under the Central Government.

Jennifer has a strong legal, administrative and leadership background, and previously worked as Commissioner Legal Services and Board Affairs in the national Uganda Revenue Authority. She has trained at Makerere University, Kampala, as well as numerous other institutions including The George Washington University, Harvard Business School and Harvard Law School.

Jennifer has over 30 international, regional and local awards and works with various international agencies on urban transformation projects as well as African City leaders on issues of urban transformation. Jennifer is also an international speaker on matters of sustainable urban transformation

Carolina Urrutia is the Secretary for the Environment for the City of Bogota. In this position, she oversees policy development and implementation as well as permits and sanctions for the use of the city’s natural resources and provides oversight of the Institute for Animal Welfare (Instituto de Bienestar y Protección Animal, IDPYBA), Risk Management and Climate Change (Instituto Distrital de Gestión del Riesgo y Cambio Climático, IDIGER) and the José Celestino Mutis Botanical Gardens (Jardín Botánico José Celestino Mutis). She previously served as director of Parques Cómo Vamos y de Incidencia Transforma (translation: Parks How We Go and Advocacy Transforms) and of Semana Sostenible (translation: Sustainable Week). She is also a consultant to the World Bank and serves as deputy director of Sustainable Development in Colombia’s National Planning Department (DNP). Carolina holds a degree in Political Science from the Iberoamerican University in Mexico and a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard University’s School of Government. 

Alyssa Ayres was appointed dean of the Elliott School of International Affairs and professor of history and international affairs at George Washington University effective February 1, 2021. Ayres is a foreign policy practitioner and award-winning author with senior experience in the government, nonprofit, and private sectors. From 2013 to 2021, she was senior fellow for India, Pakistan, and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), where she remains an adjunct senior fellow. 

Her work focuses primarily on India’s role in the world and on U.S. relations with South Asia in the larger Indo-Pacific. Her book about India’s rise on the world stage, Our Time Has Come: How India is Making Its Place in the World, was published by Oxford University Press in January 2018 and was selected by the Financial Times for its “Summer 2018: Politics” list. An updated paperback edition was released in 2019. Ayres is also interested in the emergence of subnational engagement in foreign policy, particularly the growth of international city networks, and her current book project (working title, “Bright Lights, Biggest Cities: The Urban Challenge to India’s Future,” under contract with Oxford University Press) examines India’s urban transformation and its international implications. 

From 2010 to 2013 Ayres served as deputy assistant secretary of state for South Asia. During her tenure at the State Department in the Barack Obama administration, she covered all issues across a dynamic region of 1.3 billion people at the time (Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, and Sri Lanka) and provided policy direction for four U.S. embassies and four consulates. Before serving in the Obama administration, Ayres was founding director of the India and South Asia practice at McLarty Associates, the Washington-based international strategic advisory firm, from 2008 to 2010, and served as a part-time senior advisor to the firm from 2014 to 2021. From 2007 to 2008, she served as special assistant to the undersecretary of state for political affairs as a CFR international affairs fellow. Prior to that she worked at the University of Pennsylvania's Center for the Advanced Study of India and at the Asia Society in New York.

Originally trained as a cultural historian, Ayres has carried out research on both India and Pakistan. Her book on nationalism, culture, and politics in Pakistan, Speaking Like a State, was published worldwide by Cambridge University Press in 2009 and received an American Institute of Pakistan Studies book prize for 2011–2012. She has coedited three books on India and Indian foreign policy: Power Realignments in Asia; India Briefing: Takeoff at Last?; and India Briefing: Quickening the Pace of Change. 

Ayres has been awarded numerous fellowships and has received four group or individual Superior Honor Awards for her work at the State Department. She speaks Hindi and Urdu, and in the mid-1990s worked as an interpreter for the International Committee of the Red Cross. She received an AB from Harvard College and an MA and PhD from the University of Chicago. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Halifax International Security Forum’s agenda working group, and the Women’s Foreign Policy Group board of directors. In 2021 and 2022, the Washingtonian included her as one of their “most influential people shaping policy.”

Bernice Van Bronkhorst, a Dutch national, is the Global Director for Urban, Resilience and Land Global Practice (GPURL). In her current role, she provides leadership and guidance to the work of the Urban, Resilience and Land Global Practice; oversees the implementation of the Bank's Urban, Resilience and Land Strategy; and provides leadership to the global urban agenda.

Ms. Van Bronkhorst joined the World Bank in 2005 as an Urban Specialist in the Latin America and the Caribbean Region. She has since held various positions, including as Sector/Practice Manager for the Disaster Risk Management and Climate Change unit in the South Asia Region, and Practice Manager for Urban Development and Disaster Risk Management for East and Southern Africa in the Social, Urban, Rural and Resilience GP. Most recently, prior to joining GPURL, she was the Global Director for the Climate Change Group.

Richard Damania is the Chief Economist of the Sustainable Development Practice Group, effective March 1, 2020.  He has held several positions in the World Bank including as Senior Economic Advisor in the Water Practice, Lead Economist in the Africa Region’s Sustainable Development Department, in the South Asia and Latin America and Caribbean Regions of the World Bank.  His work has spanned across multiple sectors and has helped the World Bank become an acknowledged thought-leader on matters relating to environment, water and the economy. Prior to joining the World Bank, he was a Professor of Economics at the University of Adelaide.  He has published extensively with over 100 papers in scientific journals, has held numerous advisory positions with governments and in international organizations, and serves on the Editorial Board of several prestigious scientific journals.

Stéphane Hallegatte is a Senior Climate Change Adviser at the World Bank. He joined the World Bank in 2012 after 10 years of academic research. His research interests include the economics of natural disasters and risk management, climate change adaptation, urban policy and economics, climate change mitigation, and green growth.

Robin King is the Director of Knowledge Capture and Collaboration at WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities. In this role, she promotes collaboration across WRI’s international network to better integrate urban planning, land use, and sustainable transportation using her experience working in policy matters in the Americas and Asia.

Prior to WRI, she worked as Principal Research Scholar at the Center for Study of Science, Technology and Policy (CSTEP), in Bangalore, India, where she helped lead the Next Generation Infrastructure Laboratory since August 2008. She also is an Adjunct Professor in the School of Foreign Service (SFS) at Georgetown University. Previously, she served as Academic Director of the Masters Program in Latin American Studies in SFS at Georgetown, and held posts at the G7 Group, the Organization of American States, the US Department of State, and Mellon Bank.

She holds a PhD in Economics from the University of Texas at Austin, and a BS in Foreign Service from Georgetown University. She spent a year as a Rotary Exchange student in Oruro, Bolivia, and more than a year as a Fulbright Scholar in Mexico.

Anna Wellenstein is the Regional Director for Latin America and the Caribbean in the World Bank’s Sustainable Development Practice Group. Ms. Wellenstein is responsible for the World Bank’s agriculture, climate, disaster risk management, environment, land, social, urban, and water portfolios in the region.    

Prior to this, Ms. Wellenstein was Director for Strategy and Operations of the World Bank’s Social, Urban, Rural and Resilience Global Practice, where she oversaw $25 billion in lending to developing countries in over 200 projects, 325 studies and technical assistance projects. She was a key member of the Global Practice’s senior management team that set strategy for analytics and financing in areas such as disaster risk reduction, urban renovation, and geospatial technology. She also oversaw partnerships with bilateral, United Nations, and regional organizations.

Ms. Wellenstein has over 20 years of experience in urban development and infrastructure. She has led efforts to design and finance investments, facilitate policy reforms, and build capacity to help developing countries reduce poverty and boost equity. She has been responsible for technical oversight of new projects financed by the World Bank, the portfolio quality of ongoing projects, and setting sector and country strategies. She has developed strong partnerships with governments in countries ranging from large middle income to small island states, as well as development agencies and academia.

Lint Barrage is an Associate Professor and the Chair of Energy and Climate Economics at ETH Zurich. Her research investigates how environmental processes and policies affect macroeconomic outcomes and human welfare. She brings a multi-methodological approach to this agenda, combining tools from different fields in order to leverage new data, empirics, and theoretical advancements. Examples of questions and approaches in her work include the following: (i) the fiscal costs of climate change, (ii) flood risks and housing markets  and (iii) shale gas boom and energy technology.

Nathaniel Baum-Snow has research interests in urban and real estate economics, labor economics and economic geography. Recent research includes studies about housing supply and affordability, productivity spillovers that operate between firms at hyper local spatial scales and the causes and consequences of neighborhood change. Past research also includes investigations of changes in the spatial organization of economic activity in U.S. and Chinese cities, reasons for which workers earn more and have more dispersed wages in larger cities, and the consequences of transportation infrastructure investments on urban growth and welfare. He is a Managing Editor at the Journal of Urban Economics.

Gharad Bryan is a Research Programme Director for the IGC Cities research programme. Bryan is a Lecturer in Economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and an Associate of the STICERD Economic Organisation and Public Policy programme. His research interests include development economics, behavioural economics, and experimental economics.

Ahmed Mushfiq Mobarak is a Professor of Economics at Yale University with concurrent appointments in the School of Management and in the Department of Economics. Mobarak is the founder and faculty director of the Yale Research Initiative on Innovation and Scale (Y-RISE). Mobarak has several ongoing research projects in Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sierra Leone. He conducts field experiments exploring ways to induce people in developing countries to adopt technologies or behaviors that are likely to be welfare-improving. He also examines the complexities of scaling up development interventions that are proven effective in such trials. For example, he is scaling and testing strategies to address seasonal poverty using migration subsidies or consumption loans in Bangladesh, Nepal, and Indonesia. His research has been published in journals across disciplines, including Science, Nature, Econometrica,  American Economic Review, Review of Economic Studies, the American Political Science Review, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Demography, and covered by the New York Times, The Economist, NPR, BBC, NBC, The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Science, Nature, and other media outlets around the world. He received a Carnegie Fellowship in 2017 and was named to the inaugural Vox list of 50 “scientists working to build a more perfect future” in 2022.

Adam Storeygard is an Associate Professor of Economics at Tufts University. His research interests are in development and urban economics, and particularly in urbanization, transportation, and the economic geography of sub-Saharan Africa. Much of his work uses geographic data, including satellite data. Professor Storeygard's work has appeared in journals including the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Review of Economic Studies, and Nature. He received his PhD at Brown University, an M. Phil. in Environment and Development from Cambridge University, and an A.B. in Physics from Harvard University. He is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), an affiliate of the Bureau for Research and Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), and a co-Editor of the journal Regional Science and Urban Economics.

Matthew Turner is a Professor of Economics at Brown University. He regularly teaches courses in urban and environmental economics, and occasionally, microeconomic theory. He is broadly interested in environmental and urban policy and his recent research focuses on the economics of land use and transportation. Current projects investigate the relationship between Bus Rapid Transit systems and urban air pollution, the determinants of global particulate exposure, and the effect of sewer and water service on urban development. Professor Turner holds a Ph.D. in economics from Brown University, is a past Co-Editor of the Journal of Urban Economics and is the current President of the Urban Economics Association. His research appears in the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Review of Economic Studies and Econometrica, and is regularly featured in the popular press.

Dr. Siqi Zheng is the STL Champion Professor of Urban and Real Estate Sustainability at the Center for Real Estate, and Department of Urban Studies and Planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is the faculty director of the MIT Center for Real Estate. She established MIT Sustainable Urbanization Lab in 2019, and MIT China Future City Lab in 2017, and is the faculty director of her Lab.Prof. Zheng was the former President of Asian Real Estate Society (2018-2019) and is on its Board now, and she is also on the Board of American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association (AREUEA). She is the Co-Editor of Journal of Regional Science, and Environmental and Resource Economics. She is also the Associated Editor of China Economic Review, and Journal of Economic Surveys, and is on the editorial board of Real Estate Economics, Journal of Housing Economics and Journal of the American Planning Association (JAPA). 

Prof. Zheng’s field of specialization is urban and environmental economics and policy, including environmental sustainability, and place-based policies and self-sustaining urban growth. She published in many peer reviewed international journals including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Human Behaviour, and the Journal of Economic Literature, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Journal of Economic Geography, European Economic Review, Journal of Urban Economics, Regional Science and Urban Economics, Transportation Research Part A, Environment and Planning A, Ecological Economics, Journal of Regional Science, Real Estate Economics, Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics. A book she has co-authored with Matthew Kahn, Blue Skies over Beijing: Economic Growth and the Environment in China (Princeton University Press) was published in 2016. Dr. Zheng has completed or been undertaking research projects granted or entrusted by the World Bank, the MassCPR, MITEI, MIT Portugal, MIT MCSC,  the Asian Development Bank, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, among others. She won the MIT Frank E. Perkins Award for Excellence in Graduate Advising in 2022. She received her Ph.D. in urban development and real estate from Tsinghua University in 2005, and did her post-doc research at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University. Prior to coming to MIT, she was a professor and the director of Hang Lung Center for Real Estate at Tsinghua University, China.

Paolo Avner joined the World Bank as an Urban Economist in 2014. His current work in GFDRR focuses on the links between urban form, land uses, transport systems, labor markets and vulnerability to natural hazards in developing country cities. He has worked on a number of analytical products including Urbanization Reviews (Kenya, Ethiopia, Haiti, Guinea, Mali) and flagship reports and is the author of several policy-oriented research papers. Prior to joining the Bank, Paolo worked in France as a researcher in LEPII (Grenoble) before joining the Center for International Research in Environment and Development (Paris) where he collaborated to the development of an applied land use - transport interaction model (NEDUM-2D). His work specifically focused on the ability of public policies and investments to curb greenhouse gas emissions from urban transport while limiting the costs of these policies for urban residents. Paolo has graduated from La Sorbonne University and from University Paris X - Nanterre as an economist and holds a doctorate from EHESS – École des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris.

Nancy Lozano Gracia is a Senior Economist in the Urban, Rural and Social Global Practice within the World Bank. Within GSURR she has worked extensively on designing and using diagnostic tools to improve our understanding of the challenges of rapid urbanization and city development, and help identify priorities for action. As part of these efforts, she has led work using innovative data collection methods such as satellite imagery, new survey designs, and Big Data approaches, to build a better understanding of within city challenges. As a core member of the Global Solutions Group on Territorial Development, Nancy’s work has recently focused on using spatial analysis to identify priorities for action in lagging regions. She holds a doctorate in applied economics from University of Illinois, where she worked on models for measuring capitalization of the value of local amenities into housing prices. Her areas of work span from urban and regional economics, spatial economic analysis and spatial econometric applications.

Esha Zaveri is a Senior Economist in the World Bank’s Water Global Practice and a member of the Water, Economics, and Climate Change Global Solutions Group. Her work centers around water resource management, climate impacts, and environmental health and spans from global to region-and country-level assessments in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. She has published on these topics in leading scientific journals and has authored flagship reports of the World Bank on water scarcity (Uncharted Waters, 2017), and water pollution (Quality Unknown, 2019), and recently led and authored the flagship report on water, migration, and development (Ebb and Flow, 2021). Before joining the World Bank, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University’s Center on Food Security and the Environment, where she remains an affiliated scholar. She holds a Ph.D. in Environmental Economics and Demography from Pennsylvania State University.