Philip Oreopoulos is an economist who currently serves as Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Toronto.
In addition, he has also held visiting appointments at MIT and at Harvard University.
[5] A substantial part of Oreopoulos' research deals with the consequences of changes in compulsory schooling laws, especially in the United Kingdom, which provide an exogenous variation of education.
In this context, among else, he found Other findings of Oreopoulos include (i) that workers who graduated from college during recessions suffer from persistently lower earnings for up to a decade, beginning their careers working for lower paying employers and then gradually upgrading their jobs by moving to better firms, with the speed of the upgrading determined by graduates' socioeconomic backgrounds (with Till von Wachter and Andrew Heisz);[10] (ii) that the non-financial benefits of schooling - e.g. higher work enjoyment, patience, trust, ambition, and risk aversion or also better decisions regarding health, marriage or parenting - are at least as large as the financial benefits of schooling and would - ironically - benefit school dropouts most (with Kjell Salvanes);[11] (iii) that the quality of neighborhoods in which children grow up in has only a very small impact in determining their adult earnings, likelihood of unemployment, or dependence on welfare benefits, but that the quality of the children's family environment does;[12] and (iv) that poor infant health predicts both mortality within one year, and mortality up to age 17, as well as long-term educational and labour force outcomes such as high school completion and welfare takeup.
[13] More recently and in line with his work at J-PAL, Philip Oreopoulos has used randomized controlled trials to investigate issues in education, e.g. finding that combining academic support services and financial incentives for good grades may be particularly effective in improving the grades and long-term study skills of female freshmen but will have no effect on men, in part because of poor male take-up,[14] or that combining the offer of assistance with completing the college financial aid applications with information about aid estimates may be effective in substantially increasing the likelihood of college attendance, persistence and aid receipt for low-income individuals whereas simply providing information isn't.