Alison W. Baulos

University of Chicago
Associate Director, Economics Research Center

Alison Baulos has been the Associate Director of the Economics Research Center since 2005. In this role, she works closely with Professor James Heckman to oversee and operationalize large-scale research initiatives on the various areas of human capital development. The ERC has more than 30 employees and a wide range of projects, including evaluations of early childhood interventions (in the US, Ireland and Italy), genetic analysis of rhesus monkeys, a study of the Seguro Popular program in Mexico, and others.

Together with Jennifer Boobar-Pachon, she coordinates the administrative aspects of the Human Capital and Economic Working Group network, sponsored by the Institute for New Economic Thinking. She also helped launch and still contributes to the success of the Pritzker Consortium on Early Childhood Development, a interdisciplinary network of leading scholars of the most referenced early childhood intervention studies. This work has also led to the creation of http://heckmanequation.org which provides ‘tools’ for advocates to more effectively make the case for economic investment in early childhood education.

She also provides programmatic support to the Initiative for Early Childhood Development in Developing Countries, an emerging project, led by a group of entrepreneurial Harris School of Public Policy graduate students. Together with other staff in the ERC she has also coordinates the Institute on Computational Economics, a 2-week program for graduate students held annually since 2005.

She graduated from the University of Chicago with an bachelor's degree in psychology, and will finish an A.M./M.B.A. from the University of Chicago’s Social Service Administration and Chicago Booth School of Business this year. Alison speaks Spanish, and has lived in Guam, Spain and several locations across the US.

Working Group

Early Childhood Interventions (ECI)

Additional Information

Email: abaulos@uchicago.edu