Explore the lineage of Patricia M Anderson

As a labor economist with public-economics-adjacent interests, I tend to just consider myself more broadly an applied microeconomist. While I started my career writing a lot of papers on unemployment insurance (UI) issues, in the early 2000s, what at the time seemed like historically low unemployment rates tempered everyone’s interest in such topics. I then began working on a series of papers exploring issues of childhood obesity, beginning with a paper on the impact of maternal employment on child obesity. Given that in the United States obesity is most prevalent in lower socioeconomic status communities, it seemed natural to move toward also working on issues related to food insecurity (FI). Recently, I have come full circle and have been working with students exploring the impact of UI benefits on food security.