Nicholas Reynolds is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) of Economics at the University of Essex. He received his PhD in 2020 from Brown University.

His primary line of research studies cross-cohort trends in the health and human capital of Americans and includes two solo-authored papers accepted in the American Economic Review: Insights and the Journal of Human Resources. He has presented evidence of a broad and large decline in the health and human capital of American-born cohorts, beginning suddenly with those born after 1947. The cohort decline is large enough to drive aggregate: i) educational declines in the 1960s, ii) increases in the low birth weight rate in the 1980s, iii) mortality increases since 1999, and to contribute substantially to iv) wage stagnation since the 1970s.

A second line of research uses patent data to study American innovation between 1836 and the present and includes a paper published in American Economic Journal: Applied Economics.

He has other ongoing work in labor, health, urban, and innovation economics, and demography.

He joined IZA as a Research Affiliate in 2024.