General · EdgepediaOctober 10, 20267 min read

Jere Richard Behrman

Jere Richard Behrman (born 2 March 1940) is an American economist who has spent his career at the University of Pennsylvania as the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Economics, working on empirical microeconomics in developing economies, with central contributions on human capital, early-life nutrition, schooling quality, intrahousehold allocation, and program evaluation¹. He is a Research Associate at Penn's Population Studies Center, Population Aging Research Center, and Penn Development Research Initiative¹. On RePEc, the registry of economists' research output, he is recorded under Short-ID pbe285². Google Scholar counts 64,770 citations to his work with an h-index of 126³, and in the 2024 research.com ranking of economists he placed #64 in the world and #2 among empirical micro development economists¹.

Key fact	Detail
Position	William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Economics (and Professor of Sociology) at Penn; Research Associate at PSC, PARC, and PDRI¹^•⁴
Education	B.A. summa cum laude in physics, Williams College, 1962; Ph.D. in economics, MIT, 1966, with a dissertation on Thai agricultural supply response⁵
Output	Over 530 professional articles and 36 books; principal investigator on over 180 funded projects, including 50 NIH and 18 NSF grants¹
Most-cited paper	Engle, Black, Behrman et al., "Strategies to avoid the loss of developmental potential in more than 200 million children in the developing world" (The Lancet, 2007), 1,773 citations³
Honors	National Academy of Sciences member; Econometric Society and Guggenheim fellow; 2008 Carlos Diaz-Alejandro Prize; 2011 Doctor Honoris Causa, University of Chile; 2017 Irene B. Taeuber Award⁴
Recent activity	2025 paper on costs of inaction for early-life investments in Sub-Saharan Africa; Journal of Development Economics special issue in his honor announced September 2026⁶^•⁷

Life and career

Behrman was born on 2 March 1940. He studied at Indiana University's Russian Language Institute in the summers of 1960 and 1961, took his B.A. summa cum laude with highest honors in physics at Williams College in 1962, and completed his Ph.D. in economics at MIT in 1966⁵^•⁸. His doctoral dissertation was "Supply Response in Underdeveloped Agriculture: A Case Study of Major Annual Crops in Thailand, 1937-1963".

He joined the Penn faculty in 1965 and has remained there⁵. He served as Director of Penn's Population Studies Center and as Chair of the Department of Economics⁵. His Population Studies Center research themes span formal demography, early-life conditions and older adult health, global aging and health, and child development and human endowments⁴.

Research contributions

Behrman's research covers empirical microeconomics, economic development, early childhood development, labor economics, economic demography, household behaviors, and policy evaluation⁹. His 1983 American Economic Review paper with Nancy Birdsall, "The quality of schooling: Quantity alone is misleading" (998 citations), argued that years of schooling alone misstate educational capital because school quality varies³. His 2004 "Returns to Birthweight" with Mark Rosenzweig carries 1,448 citations³.

Early-life nutrition. Using panel data over 35 years, Behrman and collaborators (Maluccio, Hoddinott, Martorell, Quisumbing, Stein) showed that nutritional improvements in early life causally improved adult cognitive skills, wage rates, and the anthropometric outcomes of the next generation¹⁰. A 2008 Lancet paper on Guatemala nutrition and productivity carries 1,237 citations³.

Intrahousehold allocation and fertility. His 1982 Journal of Political Economy paper "Parental preferences and provision for progeny" (894 citations), a 1987 JPE paper with Anil Deolalikar on rural South India (740 citations), and a 1988 Oxford Economic Papers paper on intrahousehold allocation (724 citations) shaped how economists model how parents distribute resources among children³.

Program evaluation. Behrman, Sengupta, and Todd's impact assessments of Mexico's PROGRESA conditional cash transfer program are summarized in "Progressing through PROGRESA" (760 citations)³^•².

Data and methods

The 35-year Guatemala panel provided the causal evidence on early-life nutrition¹⁰. The PROGRESA evaluation data supported his impact-assessment work². Young Lives longitudinal data for Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam underpin analyses showing that early-life height-for-age z scores, subsequent changes in HAZ, and better water and sanitation predict later childhood and adolescent cognitive test performance¹¹. With GRADE in Peru he used Young Lives to estimate associations between foundational cognitive skills measured at age 12 and educational outcomes at ages 15 and 19-20 in Ethiopia and Peru, and to study Peru's JUNTOS conditional cash transfer, finding that younger siblings in recipient households display significantly higher foundational cognitive skills¹².

He has also exploited natural experiments. A 2020 Maternal & Child Nutrition study with Nandi, Black, Kinra, and Laxminarayan used the 1987-1990 Indian ICDS supplement trial (15 intervention versus 14 control villages) and found that women born in intervention villages had menarche 0.45 years later and first pregnancy 0.53 years later than controls⁹. A 2023 study with Breton and Kohler interviewed 1,878 adolescents in rural Malawi between 2017 and 2018 and again in 2021, finding that each additional adverse childhood experience was associated with higher odds of emotional IPV victimization for boys (OR 1.12) and sexual IPV victimization for girls (OR 1.18)⁹.

By the numbers

Other databases give lower counts: the Penn Economics page counts over 530 articles and 36 books, while the PSC page says over 480 articles and 35 books and VoxDev says over 525 articles and 37 books¹^•⁴^•¹³. Grant counts also differ by source: Penn Economics reports over 180 projects with 50 NIH and 18 NSF grants, the PSC page over 160 projects with 45 NIH and 15 NSF grants¹^•⁴.

How it compares with his peers

His Google Scholar co-author list includes Mark Rosenzweig, Nancy Birdsall, Harold Alderman, John Hoddinott, Anil Deolalikar, Petra Todd, Susan Parker, Reynaldo Martorell, Aryeh Stein, and Hans-Peter Kohler³. He is affiliated with the Centre for Economic Policy Research¹⁴. In the 2024 research.com ranking he placed #64 worldwide, #52 in the United States, and #2 among empirical micro development economists; in the AD Scientific Index World Top 100 for Economics and Econometrics he ranked #14 on i10-index and #31 on h-index¹. The Journal of Development Economics announced a special issue, "Human Capital Over the Life Course," in his honor in September 2026, citing his foundational role in advancing multidisciplinary human capital research⁷.

Policy influence

His 2008 working paper for the World Bank Commission on Growth and Development concluded that better early-life nutrition should be a high priority in growth and productivity strategies, noting that such interventions had been ranked highly among all intervention types in the 2004 Copenhagen Consensus benefit-cost analysis¹⁰. He co-authored 2021 Lancet work (with Black and Daelmans) organized around the WHO Nurturing Care Framework's five components: health, nutrition, security and safety, responsive caregiving, and early learning¹¹, and gave keynote addresses at launches of the Lancet Third Series on Early Childhood Development in Mexico City, Santiago, and Lima.

His evaluations addressed specific programs. His JUNTOS work in Peru linked transfer enrollment age to children's cognitive skills¹². A 2024 result on Mexico's 2002 universal preschool mandate found significant lasting benefits for cognitive and non-cognitive skills after six years and educational outcomes nearly two decades later¹³. He has worked as a researcher with the World Bank, Asian Development Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, UNDP, UNICEF, and various governments⁴^•⁸, and served as the Economics/Social Science member of the NICHD Advisory Council and on the NAS-NRC Committee on Population⁵.

Awards, honors, and editorial roles

Behrman is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the Econometric Society, and of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation⁴. He received the 2008 Carlos Diaz-Alejandro Prize, a 2011 Doctor Honoris Causa from the University of Chile, and the 2017 Irene B. Taeuber Award from the Population Association of America and Princeton's Office of Population Research, given for an unusually original or important contribution to the scientific study of population⁴^•¹⁵. In 2024 he received a Clinical Research Forum Top 10 Clinical Research Achievement Award for "The effects of government-led cash transfers on all-cause mortality in low- and middle-income countries"¹. He won Penn's Irving B. Kravis Award for Distinction in Undergraduate Teaching and has served on over 150 Ph.D. dissertation committees⁵. His editorial duties have included the Journal of Development Economics, Demography, Journal of Applied Econometrics, and Economics of Education Review⁸.

References

Initially written Oct 10, 2026 · Edited: Oct 11, 2026; Oct 15, 2026