Henrik Kleven

Richard Musgrave Visiting Professorship 2024

Professor Henrik Kleven is the CESifo and IIPF Richard Musgrave Guest Professor 2024. He is the Lynn Bendheim Thoman, Class of 1977, and Robert Bendheim, Class of 1937, Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University. He is appointed jointly by the Department of Economics and the School of Public and International Affairs. Previously, he has held positions at the London School of Economics and the University of Copenhagen. He received his PhD from the University of Copenhagen in 2003. He has served as Co-Editor of the American Economic Review and Chief Editor of the Journal of Public Economics. He is a Fellow member of the CESifo Network and a Research Associate at NBER.

His research focuses on questions in public economics, labor economics, and inequality. This includes research on the effects and optimal design of public policies (such as tax policy, welfare, and family policy) as well as research on gender inequality in the labor market. His work has been published in all leading academic journals of economics. It is regularly cited in top media outlets, and it has influenced policy making in several countries.

Henrik Kleven is currently studying how child penalties -- i.e., the effects of parenthood on women relative to men — affect gender inequality in labor market outcomes. He is especially interested in understanding how general child penalties are, how they vary with political and cultural institutions, and how they evolve with economic development. In a recent paper, he and his co-authors Camille Landais and Gabriel Leite-Mariante develop a global atlas of child penalties. The atlas is based on nationally representative micro data from 134 countries, covering more than 95% of the global population. In a related paper, Henrik Kleven develops an innovative approach to estimating child penalties based on cross-sectional data and pseudo-event studies around childbirth.

In his capacity as guest professor, Henrik Kleven will deliver the 16th Richard Musgrave Lecture entitled "The Child Penalty Atlas" on 21 March at 6 pm.