Jennifer Ward-Batts
Prof. Jennifer Ward-Batts is assistant professor of Economics at Wayne State University in Detroit. She obtained her PhD in economics from the University of Washington in Seattle, and her Bachelor of Arts degree in economics from the University of North Carolina at Asheville. She did postdoctoral study at the University of Michigan in economic demography and the economics of aging. She received a Sloan Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship to fund her dissertation work examining intrahousehold allocation in the UK before and after a policy change affecting government benefits to families with children. She was also awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from the National Institute on Aging (1999-2001), and a Fulbright Fellowship to conduct research at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey (2008-09). She has taught at University of Washington, University of Michigan, Claremont McKenna College, and Wayne State University. Her research focuses on individual and household decision-making about outcomes that affect welfare of individuals and families, especially women, and children, including household spending patterns, saving for retirement, inter-household transfers, time allocation, residence location choice, educational investments, and labor supply. She has published papers in Cuestiones Economicas, the Journal of Human Resources, the Journal of Public Economics, and the American Economic Review. She contributed a book chapter to How Do We Spend Our Time? Evidence from the American Time Use Survey. She has presented work at numerous conferences and at universities in the US, Canada, UK, France, Italy, Switzerland, and Turkey.
Research interest(s)/area of expertise
Labor and Demographic Economics
Education
- PhD, Economics, University of Washington, 1999
- BA, Economics, UNC - Ahseville, 1993