Erdal Tekin a Professor of Public Policy in the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington DC, USA. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and a Research Fellow at the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA). Additionally, he is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. Dr. Tekin was a Professor of Economics at Georgia State University between 2001-2014. He currently works on three main lines of research. One line of work focuses on the U.S. child care system and examines the relationship between various aspects of the child care system such as the relationship government subsidies and regulations and parental and child outcomes including parental employment and child development. Dr. Tekin's second line of research concerns the analysis of risky behaviors. Broadly defined, these are the type of behaviors that involves a trade-off between short-term benefits and long-term costs and include unhealthy behaviors such as smoking, excessive alcohol consumption, illicit drug use, sedentary life styles and unhealthy eating behaviors associated with obesity, risky sexual behavior and criminal activities. Dr. Tekin has a comprehensive research agenda focused on understanding the cultural, social, and economic contexts responsible for these behaviors and developing evidence-based and data driven policies to reduce both their prevalence and the costs. The third focus of his research is on the impact of early life exposure to risk factors such as environmental pollution, malnutrition, and trauma associated with firearm violence on birth outcomes as well as the well-being of individuals at childhood and adulthood. Dr. Tekin's research has been published in numerous peer-reviewed journals, including Review of Economics and Statistics, the Economic Journal, American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, and Journal of Human Resources, and funded by institutions such as the National Institutes of Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, among others.
