Department of Economics

Jorge Agüero

About me

Short bio | How to pronounce my name | Citizenship
Michele | Gabriel

Short bio

Jorge Agüero is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of California, Riverside. His main areas of research are development and labor economics. Jorge takes an innovative approach to policies that could help break the intergenerational transmission of poverty. He is particularly interested in two key areas leading to poverty persistence: discrimination and the lack of accumulation of human capital.

Jorge’s research aims to disentangle the myriad theories that explain discrimination in order to find the most effective policies to attack this phenomenon. With respect to human capital, his research focuses on how it accumulates, whether or not current policies and extra-curricular factors assist in this accumulation, and the speed of its depreciation. His recent papers address racial discrimination in the labor market, as well as the role of a government cash transfer program on the accumulation of human capital.

Jorge holds a Ph.D. in Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a Masters in Economics from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona, Spain), and a BA in Economics from the Pontificia Universidad Catolica (Lima, Peru). As might be expected from such an international background, he has worked on projects addressing poverty in several developing countries, including South Africa, Peru, and Brazil.

Jorge is married to Michele Back, a pioneering scholar in Second Language Acquisition and a skilled linguist. They have one son, Gabriel, who is a future soccer player for Real Madrid or Barcelona.

How to pronounce my name

coming soon!

Citizenship

Saying that I was born in Peru and now I am also a Permanent Resident in the United States would be too brief. Specially when I am a descendant of a mixture of Italian, Irish, Chinese, Spanish, African, Indigenous Peruvian and who knows what else.

Michele

You can visit my wife's webpage here

Gabriel

You can see pictures of Gabriel Antonio here