By Tara Haelle

As a new graduate professor in the Department of Economics, Sandra Black brings more than her Harvard graduate education and her experience as a senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank to the classroom. The first female full professor in the department also brings expansive interdisciplinary research that connects sociology and gender issues to economics.

Photo by Tara Haelle

“I focus on how family background and early childhood affects children’s long-run outcomes,” she said. “I also do some work on discrimination and gender issues.”

Black’s mother was a teacher and curriculum coordinator, and much of Black’s research looks at how the educational experiences of children both academically and socially influence their success as adults. Although these topics have traditionally been in the realm of sociologists and education researchers, Black believes economics can be instrumental in understanding how early experiences impact an adult’s salary and wages.

“The part economics can contribute is trying to pin down causation,” Black said. “It’s not just the correlation between different factors [and long-term outcomes]. We try to think about how each component affects the child directly.”

Those components range from birth order to family size, to a child’s school starting age, to the education levels of a child’s parents.

Some of Black’s most recent research looks at how one’s teenage peers affect a person’s outcome, taking into account how those peers impact a person’s IQ, teenage fertility, wages, higher education and similar factors. Past papers by Black explore whether compulsory schooling laws have an effect on teenage pregnancy rates, the relationship between birth weight and development, and the effects of globalization on gender discrimination.

It was this kind of wide-ranging research that interested the University of Texas. Mark Hayward, sociologist and director of the University’s Population Research Center, said Black is researching the kinds of questions that the center is particularly interested in — questions not limited to just one field.

Black will work with Hayward’s center as well as the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies. These affiliations will help her continue conducting the kind of research she has studied in prestigious past positions: a visiting economist at Princeton University, a fellow at the Stanford Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality and associate editor of “Labour Economics” and “Review of Economics and Statistics.” She has been on the faculty at UCLA since 2001 and was a visiting professor at UT last year. This year, she will teach labor economics.

“I think labor economics has really expanded more broadly beyond unemployment and now looks more at research on things like education, marriage and crime,” she said. “It’s pretty far afield from what you would think of as labor economics.”

Black said her work attempts to help make sense out of why some social programs are effective while others are not.

“There are a lot of social programs aimed at family background, and understanding what the long-run effects of those programs are is important,” she said. “Some are worthwhile, and some are not. One of my goals is to try to understand the mechanisms by which some work and some don’t.”

Black said her experience as a visiting professor at UT impressed her.

“I really like the department, and I really like the people I met at the University more broadly,” she said. “There are a lot of opportunities for my own research in the department and across disciplines.”

Although she is cognizant that her hiring as the first female full economics professor reflects the ongoing efforts of the College of Liberal Arts to eliminate gender inequality among faculty, Black does not believe her gender played a part in her hiring. Her research suits the research within the department as well as at the two centers.

“There’s a common goal of doing good research at this University and good support of that goal,” Black said.