Heather Royer (born c. 1974) is an American economist who is a Professor of Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara[1] and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research.[2] She has been an Associate Editor of The Journal of Human Resources,[3] the Journal of Health Economics, and the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, and will become coeditor of the AEA Journal of Economic Policy in September 2021.[4]
Heather Royer | |
|---|---|
| Born | c. 1974 |
| Alma mater | West Valley High School (Alaska) Pomona College, B.A. University of California at Berkeley, Ph.D. |
| Children | 2 |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Economics |
| Institutions | University of California at Santa Barbara, Case Western Reserve University |
| Doctoral advisors | David Card |
| Website | https://econ.ucsb.edu/people/faculty/heather-royer |
She was a member of the women's team that set a world record in a swimming relay from Palos Verdes to Santa Catalina Island in 1994,[5] and swam the English Channel in 1999.[6][7] She is a member of the Alaska Swimming Hall of Fame.[8]
Research
Royer's research focuses on causal inference in health economics.[9] She has studied how education affects health using variation induced by school-entry and compulsory schooling policies in the U.S. and in England.[10] In work with Mariana Carrera, she also found that commitment contracts, which offered people funds to go to the gym during a three-month experiment period, were effective at motivating people to develop a habit of gym-going that lasted for years after the experiment ended.[11][12][13]
Selected works
- McCrary, Justin, and Heather Royer. "The effect of female education on fertility and infant health: evidence from school entry policies using exact date of birth." American economic review 101, no. 1 (2011): 158–95.
- Clark, Damon, and Heather Royer. "The effect of education on adult mortality and health: Evidence from Britain." American Economic Review 103, no. 6 (2013): 2087–2120.
- Royer, Heather. "Separated at girth: US twin estimates of the effects of birth weight." American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 1, no. 1 (2009): 49–85.
- Royer, Heather, Mark Stehr, and Justin Sydnor. "Incentives, commitments, and habit formation in exercise: evidence from a field experiment with workers at a fortune-500 company." American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 7, no. 3 (2015): 51–84.
- Carrera, Mariana, Heather Royer, Mark Stehr, Justin Sydnor, and Dmitry Taubinsky. "The limits of simple implementation intentions: Evidence from a field experiment on making plans to exercise." Journal of health economics 62 (2018): 95–104.