Daniel Hicks

Daniel Hicks is an applied economist with over a decade of experience researching topics such as gender ­inequality and household labor, health and environmental economics, education, crime, conflict, and public policy. He has recently worked to estimate the causal impacts of air pollution, environmental shocks, and climate change on the health of vulnerable populations. He is currently serving as co-investigator for an ongoing NASA Land-Cover and Land-Use Change Program Grant to study population health vulnerabilities induced by the China’s Belt and Road Initiative throughout Central Asia. At RAND, he has studied educational interventions for at-risk youth, worked to resolve information and policy gaps for physical fitness assessments, and helped the Army identify how new technologies and approaches can be harnessed to gain early insights into emerging global disease epidemics. In addition to studies on the United States, he has undertaken research projects on Bolivia, China, Egypt, India, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Mexico, South Korea, and Uzbekistan. Before working at RAND, Hicks was a tenured associate professor at the University of Oklahoma. His studies have been published in numerous outlets such as the American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, Economic Inquiry, the European Journal of Political Economy, the Review of Economics of the Household, the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, and Oxford Economic Papers. His research has been featured in the Economist, the Atlantic, the Boston Globe, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the LSE United States Politics and Policy Centre, and VoxEU.