Flávio Cunha

About

Flávio Cunha is the Ervin K. Zingler Chair of Economics at Rice University and Director of the Center for Economic Mobility at the Kinder Institute for Urban Research. He also serves as the Wiess College Magister. His research specializes in labor economics, focusing on human capital formation over the lifecycle. His contributions have been recognized with the Frisch Medal from the Econometric Society and the Aigner Award from the Journal of Econometrics.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Engineering
• Economics
• Psychology
• Economic growth
• Demographic economics
• Microeconomics
• History
• Epistemology
• Statistics

Selected publications

• Persistence and Fade-Out of Educational-Intervention Effects: Mechanisms and Potential Solutions

  Psychological Science in the Public Interest · 2020 · 261 citations

  . We review the evidence for persistence and fadeout, drawing primarily on evidence from educational interventions. We conclude that 1) fadeout is widespread, and often co-exists with persistence; 2) fadeout is a substantive phenomenon, not merely a measurement artefact; and 3) persistence depends on the types of skills targeted, the institutional constraints and opportunities within the social context, and complementarities between interventions and subsequent environmental affordances. We disc…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Maternal subjective expectations about the technology of skill formation predict investments in children one year later

  Journal of Econometrics · 2020 · 52 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Early life height and weight production functions with endogenous energy and protein inputs

  Economics & Human Biology · 2016-03-11 · 44 citations

  articleOpen access

  We examine effects of protein and energy intakes on height and weight growth for children between 6 and 24 months old in Guatemala and the Philippines. Using instrumental variables to control for endogeneity and estimating multiple specifications, we find that protein intake plays an important and positive role in height and weight growth in the 6-24 month period. Energy from other macronutrients, however, does not have a robust relation with these two anthropometric measures. Our estimates indi…

  PublisherDOI

• Subjective Rationality, Parenting Styles, and Investments in Children

  National symposium on family issues · 2014-10-07 · 32 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Decomposing Trends in Inequality in Earnings into Forecastable and Uncertain Components

  Journal of Labor Economics · 2016-02-11 · 28 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  A substantial empirical literature documents the rise in wage inequality in the American economy. It is silent on whether the increase in inequality is due to components of earnings that are predictable by agents or whether it is due to greater uncertainty facing them. These two sources of variability have different consequences for both aggregate and individual welfare. Using data on two cohorts of American males we find that a large component of the rise in inequality for less skilled workers…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Eliciting Maternal Knowledge about the Technology of Skill Formation

  NIH · $3.1M · 2013–2019

• Eliciting Maternal Knowledge about the Technology of Skill Formation

  NIH · $674k · 2013–2018

Frequent coauthors

• James J. Heckman

  170 shared

• Jennifer F. Culhane

  Yale University

  87 shared

• Irma T. Elo

  University of Pennsylvania

  86 shared

• Susanne M. Schennach

  Brown University

  31 shared

• Salvador Navarro

  20 shared

• Lance Lochner

  Western University

  5 shared

• James J. Heckman

  5 shared

• Esteban Puentes

  4 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Economics

  Rice University

Awards & honors

• Frisch Medal from the Econometric Society
• Aigner Award from the Journal of Econometrics

Similar researchers at Rice University

• Vivian Hoh-38
• Isabelle Perrigneh-31
• Jeremy Foxh-30