Henrik Jacobsen Kleven (born 28 April 1971) is a Danish economist who is currently a professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University.
His research lies inside the domain of public economics and inequality, in particular questions about tax policy and welfare programs.
[2] Kleven's research combines economic theory and empirical evidence (often using large administrative datasets) to study the impact and design of public policies.
Among his co-authors are the Danish public finance economists Peter Birch Sørensen and Claus Thustrup Kreiner as well as Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman, Camille Landais, Wojciech Kopczuk, Joel Slemrod, and Jonathan Gruber.
He argues that the historical increase in labor force participation among single mothers in the 1990s was driven primarily by welfare reform and a strong macro economy rather than by the EITC.
Together with co-authors, he shows that child penalties are very large and persistent in a range of countries and that they account for most of the remaining gender inequality.
In other papers, Kleven studies the underlying factors that might be responsible for the large child penalties on women such as biology, comparative advantage, public policies, social norms and culture.