Nicholas Papageorge is assistant professor in the economics department at Johns Hopkins University.

He studied at the University of Chicago (BA), at Humboldt University Berlin (MA) and Washington University in St. Louis (PhD).

His research focus is on human capital. He mainly likes to use large observational data sets to try to understand how people choose to invest in their human capital (including their education, health and non-cognitive skills). He also aims to examine variation in returns to different forms of human capital (for example, by employment sector or by racial group). Most of his recent efforts center around five areas of inquiry. They are (i) the value of pharmaceutical innovation; (ii) heterogeneity in the returns to non-cognitive skills; (iii) the role of beliefs, including biases in teacher expectations, in explaining racial achievement gaps; (iv) how recent advances in behavioral genetics can be used to understand interactions between ability endowments and childhood poverty to generate educational outcomes and (v) the interaction between opportunity costs of time, work flexibility and mental health treatment decisions.

Nicholas joined IZA as a Research Fellow in September 2016.