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Faculty Profile: Daniel Rosenblum

I’ll tell you a secret – I think a lot more people are interested in economics than you might think. Because really, you can weave an economic thread through just about any discipline. If your interests lean towards psychology, there’s behavioral economics. If you’re a historian, study economic history. Biologist? Well, then there’s neuroeconomics! In my case, as a mathy kid who didn’t really love theoretical math, economics was a way to use that skill set and apply it to all kinds of things that I was interested in. Economics meant I didn’t have to limit my options.

My first exposure to economics was in high school. I grew up in the US, and I took an AP Economics class in tenth grade and thought – hey, this is pretty neat! But it wasn’t until I was in my undergrad at Williams College (go Purple Cows!) that I knew I wanted to be an economist.

What really hooked me on economics was my experience as an undergraduate Research Assistant, which took me to South Africa for a summer. I helped put data/statistics together as part of a larger effort to argue for the benefits of a Basic Income Grant in South Africa. (This policy was not adopted 25 years ago when I was there, but I hope we see it one day soon.) This experience also helped me start seriously thinking about development economics as a field to pursue in graduate school.

Fast forward to my PhD program at Yale University, when I was just starting to think about my dissertation. I had the opportunity to go to the newly formed Centre for Microfinance in Chennai, India. On the one hand, the trip gave me lots of research ideas. On the other hand, the randomized controlled trial experiment that I had been working on to estimate the benefits of micro health insurance ended up falling apart before it could even get started. It taught me a lot of very important lessons about research and what kind of work I wanted to do. I pivoted, and inspired by the work of Amartya Sen (who at the time had recently won the Nobel Prize), I completed my dissertation focused on understanding the economics behind the large gender disparities in India. I have subsequently published several academic articles on this same topic.

During that same period in graduate school, I had this idea that there must be some effect on drug markets or its externalities from the Taliban (back in 2000) eradicating poppy cultivation in Afghanistan, causing a huge drop in the world’s opium supply. Economists love a natural experiment! In digging around for data on this, I came across a multidisciplinary group of researchers who were looking at the heroin market in the US and asked if I would be interested in collaborating with them on a grant application. I did and we got the grant. And that seemingly random research idea brought me into this whole other world of public health and social work and anthropology to do research on what would later become the ongoing overdose epidemic, one of the biggest health crises in the US. Many years and a couple grants later, I am still working on this research. I think this really demonstrates the best parts of my work: exploring diverse interests, working across disciplines, and making real world impacts.

Now that the Taliban has taken power in Afghanistan again, they are working to eradicate opium farming again. I wonder what the effects will be this time on ordinary people, both in Afghanistan and the spillover effects on regions connected to the drug trade. Because honestly, that’s where my interests really lie – in how policies have impacts on the individuals in a society.

After growing up in the US, how did I end up in Canada? Well, my Canadian partner indicated her very strong preference for living in Canada, so when it came time to look for a job, I was fortunate to have found a home at ±«Óãtv. I’ve been here ever since, and I couldn’t be happier.

Today, although some of what I teach is related to my research, it also explores other topics that I find particularly important – things I wish I had learned in undergrad. Ethics, Justice, and Economics analyzes lots of (fully justified) complaints about economics through a philosophical lens. A new course that I developed, the Economics of Racism, considers how economists have historically approached issues of race (spoiler alert: there’s a lot to unpack) and asks critical questions about how economics can and should be used to understand racial disparities. Most importantly, what should we do about it?

The amazing thing about being an economics professor is that you don’t have to choose just one research path, or just one teaching topic, or just one kind of work. I’m looking forward to seeing where my next research idea leads!