Featured Researcher: Manasi Deshpande
Manasi Deshpande (pronounced MAH-nuh-see desh-PAHN-day), an associate professor of economics at the University of Chicago, focuses her research on public finance and labor markets, in particular on the effects of social insurance and public assistance programs.
Deshpande initially became interested in economics in high school as “a framework for thinking about the problems we face.” That interest deepened during her undergraduate days at the University of Texas at Austin, where she “found humanities classes were very good at describing conditions in the world, whether about poverty or the environment, but not very good at suggesting solutions. That’s where economics steps in for me — exploring the costs and benefits of different policies.”
While working at the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project after college but before beginning doctoral studies at MIT, she began homing in on what would become her research focus. This was her first exposure to social insurance, social safety net issues, and the trade-offs, some of which involve labor markets, encountered in considering whether to make a program more or less generous.
Social assistance programs potentially have many benefits, but one downside is that they may discourage work. “Balancing the trade-offs is very important to getting policy right. Much work has been done on costs. I wanted to contribute to balance by exploring benefits.”
An example is a series of research studies Deshpande completed with Michael Mueller-Smith, an economics professor at the University of Michigan and fellow NBER affiliate, on what happens when individuals who qualified for disability benefits when under the age of 18 reach that age and become ineligible. They find that a small fraction of those in this group go on to be successful in the labor market while a much larger fraction become involved in the criminal justice system. There are significant increases in charges for income-generating crimes such as burglary and theft, suggesting that the benefits “do a lot to discourage crime, much more than they discourage work,” she concludes.
As an NBER Research Associate, Deshpande is affiliated with the Economics of Aging, Public Economics, Children and Families, and Economics of Health programs. She is a coeditor of the Journal of Public Economics and a member of the editorial board of the American Economic Review.
