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” and 2024 study “Law-Abiding Immigrants: The Incarceration Gap Between Immigrants and the US-born, 1870–2020” received widespread media attention, including from the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and Bloomberg.
Current Research
Mental Health. Jácome is exploring the impact of mental health on economic outcomes. In one project, she studies 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. Ongoing work studies how acute mental health shocks impact individuals’ employment and earnings trajectories.
Intergenerational Mobility. Jácome is studying the intergenerational mobility of immigrants in the United States, finding that immigrants have higher rates of upward mobility than children of the US-born. Ongoing work studies the reasons underlying immigrants’ higher upward mobility. In other co-authored work, Jácome studies trends in U.S. intergenerational mobility over the 20th century for representative samples of the population (namely, including women and Black Americans). This 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 is currently investigating the effect of higher levels of immigration enforcement on crime and crime reporting. Her research shows that heightened enforcement reduces the likelihood that Hispanic victims report crimes to the police and increased victimization of Hispanics. She also has work measuring historical and contemporary differences between immigrants and the U.S.-born in their likelihood of incarceration.
Selected Publications
Jácome, E., I. Kuziemko, and S. Naidu. 2025. Mobility for all: Representative intergenerational mobility estimates over the 20th century. Journal of Political Economy 133(1): 1–384.
Abramitzky, R., L. Boustan, E. Jácome, S. Pérez, J. David Torres. 2024. Law-abiding immigrants: The incarceration gap between immigrants and the US-born, 1870–2020. American Economic Review: Insights 6(4): 453–71.
Jácome, E. 2022. The effect of immigration enforcement on crime reporting: Evidence from Dallas. Journal of Urban Economics 128: 103395.
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.
