PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] – Six PSTC trainees have completed their degrees at Brown, along with the PSTC’s demography training requirements, and successfully navigated the job market. Three will be assuming tenure-track teaching positions, one is continuing research as a postdoctoral fellow, and two have taken positions at RTI International.

Joseph Kofi Acquah (Economics) wrapped up his time at Brown with his dissertation, “Peer-to-peer lending and birth outcomes during national economic crises,” which explores the credit extension capabilities of rotating savings and credit institutions (ROSCAs) during the 1998 Indonesian financial crises. He and Angélica Meinhofer (Economics) will join RTI International following graduation—Acquah as an economist and Meinhofer as a health policy researcher in the Behavioral Health and Criminal Justice Research branch. 

Meinhofer’s dissertation, “The War on Drugs: Estimating the Effect of Prescription Drug Supply-Side Interventions,” estimates the effect of supply-side interventions on prescription drug availability, abuse, public health, and crime, basing the study in Florida, the epicenter of the prescription drug abuse epidemic in the late-2000s. She finds that enforced regulation of pharmaceuticals' legal supply chains can reduce prescription drug abuse substantially and sustainably.

Alex Eble (Economics) will join the faculty at Columbia University’s Teacher College as an assistant professor of Economics and Education. His dissertation, “The Importance of Educational Credentials: Schooling Decisions and Returns in Modern China,” finds that requiring an additional year of education to obtain educational credentials generates a two percent gain in monthly income, with somewhat higher returns for China's disadvantaged.

Weeam Hammoudeh (Sociology) will begin as an assistant professor at the Institute of Community and Public Health at Birzeit University. Her dissertation, “(Re)Producing the Citizenry: Reproduction and the Palestinian (Quasi) State-Building Project,” examines fertility decline during the quasi-state building era in Palestine and points to the importance of the interactions between the political, economic, and social contexts in framing reproductive aspirations and decisions.

Morgan Hardy (Economics) will head to Abu Dhabi as an assistant professor of Economics at the New York University campus there. Her dissertation, "It Takes Two: Experimental Evidence on the Determinants of Technology Diffusion," reports the results of a field experiment in Ghana designed to mimic market interactions among small-scale manufacturing firm owners and suggests that competition is an important barrier to technology diffusion in this context.

Heather Randell (Sociology) began in January as a postdoctoral fellow at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC), University of Maryland, Annapolis. Her dissertation, “Hydropower and the dynamics of displacement: Forced migration and agricultural livelihoods in the Brazilian Amazon,” addresses the roles of structure and agency in the forced migration process; the impacts of displacement and compensation on wealth, socioeconomic inequality, and subjective well-being; and the effects of displacement and compensation on productive investments and income diversification.