Petra Todd

Petra Todd is the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Economics. Todd joined the School’s Department of Economics in 1996. She served as the Alfred L. Cass Term Professor of Economics from 2010 to 2016 and the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Economics from 2016 until being appointed to the Browne professorship. She is the current Chair of the Department of Economics and a Research Associate of Penn’s Population Studies Center.

Todd’s areas of research include social program evaluation, education economics, labor economics, and micro-econometrics. Her current projects include analyses of the effects of personality traits on gender market disparities and of minimum wage policies in the United States.

Co-author of Impact Evaluation in Developing Countries: Theory, Methods and Practice (World Bank 2022), Todd has also published numerous papers on econometric methods for evaluating the effects of policy interventions, the determinants of cognitive achievement, testing for discrimination in motor vehicle searches, sources of racial and gender labor market disparities, conditional cash transfer programs, and pension program design.

Grant support for Todd’s research has come from the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Health, the Spencer Foundation, and the University of Pennsylvania’s Population Aging Research Center. Her university service at Penn has included membership on the Faculty Council on Access and Academic Support Committee, Committee for Undergraduate Education, Faculty Senate, and Graduate Admissions Committee. She is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the International Association of Energy Economics. She holds membership in the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Institute of Labor Economics, and the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Global Working Group.