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Elisa Jácome

Assistant Professor of Economics

PhD, Economics, Princeton University, 2021

Elisa Jácome’s research primarily focuses on topics in labor economics, public economics, and economic history. She is interested in questions related to criminal justice, immigration, mental health, and intergenerational mobility.

Jácome spent 2021–22 as a postdoctoral fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) after receiving her PhD in economics from Princeton.

Her 2021 study “Intergenerational Mobility of Immigrants in the U.S. over Two Centuries” received widespread media attention, including from the New York Times and Bloomberg.

Current Research

Mental Health and Crime.  Jácome is exploring whether access to mental healthcare lowers the likelihood that individuals with mental illness will become criminally involved. Her research shows that within two years of losing access to Medicaid services, men with a mental health history were more likely to be incarcerated.

Intergenerational Mobility. Jácome is studying trends in U.S. intergenerational mobility over the 20th century for representative samples of the population (namely, including women and Black Americans). Her co-authored work shows that the United States starts the 20th century much further from the “American Dream” ideal of a mobile society but also improves more significantly when the full population is considered rather than only White men.

Immigration and Crime.  Jácome has studied the intergenerational mobility of immigrants. She is currently investigating the effect of higher levels of immigration enforcement on crime and crime reporting, as well as measuring historical and contemporary differences between immigrants and the U.S.-born in their likelihood of incarceration.

Selected Publications

Jácome, E. 2022. The effect of immigration enforcement on crime reporting: Evidence from Dallas. Journal of Urban Economics 128.

Abramitzky, R., L. Boustan, E. Jácome, and S. Pérez. 2021. Intergenerational mobility of immigrants in the U.S. over two centuries. American Economic Review 111(2): 580–608.