Janet Currie is a Canadian-American economist and the Henry Putnam Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University's School of Public and International Affairs, where she is Co-Director of the Center for Health and Wellbeing. She served as the Chair of the Department of Economics at Princeton from 2014–2018. She also served as the first female Chair of the Department of Economics at Columbia University from 2006–2009. Before Columbia, she taught at the University of California, Los Angeles and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was named one of the top 10 women in economics by the World Economic Forum in July 2015. She was recognized for her mentorship of younger economists with the Carolyn Shaw Bell Award from the American Economics Association in 2015.
Education
Currie received a B.A. in economics in 1982 and a M.A. in economics in 1983 from the University of Toronto. She then pursued graduate studies at Princeton University, where she received a Ph.D. in economics in 1988.
Career
Currie co-directs the Program on Families and Children at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She is past president of the Society of Labor Economists, the Eastern Economics Association, and the American Society of Health Economics, and previously served as vice-president of the American Economic Association. She is on the Board of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the Behavior and Inequality Research Institute, and on the Board of Academic Advisors for the Opportunity and Inclusive Growth Institute at Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Currie has served as a member of the Advisory Committee on Labor and Income Statistics for Statistics Canada and as a consultant for the National Health Interview Survey and the National Longitudinal Surveys. She also serves on the advisory boards of the National Children's Study, the Committee on National Statistics, the National Academy of Science, the Environmental Defense Fund, and Blue Health Intelligence. She currently sits on the board of governors of Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine and the New Jersey Integrated Population Health Data Project.
She served on the Board of Reviewing Editors for Science magazine from 2014–2018, and as the editor of the Journal of Economic Literature from 2010–2013. Currie currently serves on the advisory board for the Journal of Economic Perspectives, and as Associate Editor for the Journal of Population Economics. She has previously held editorial roles for numerous economic peer-reviewed journals, including the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Health Economics, and the Journal of Public Economics.
Research
Although Currie published several studies early in her career about collective bargaining in the public sector, she is best known for her work on the impact of poverty and government anti-poverty policies on the health and well-being of children over their life cycle. Beginning the early 1990s, she was one of the first economists to evaluate such programs from the point of view of the child. She has written about early intervention programs, expansions of Medicaid program, public housing and food and nutrition programs. In work with Duncan Thomas and Eliana Garces, she showed that children in Head Start made gains relative to their own siblings in terms of both test scores and longer-term measures of attainment. In work with Jonathan Gruber, she showed that expansions of public health insurance to low income women and children improved access to care and reduced infant mortality. Research on the effects of the safety net on American children is reviewed in her book, "The Invisible Safety Net." She also more recently has advocated for cash transfers, in conjunction with other safety nets, given their helpfulness in raising families out of poverty.