Population Studies and Training Center

Jesse is an Assistant Professor of Economics and an affiliate of the Annenberg Institute, the Wheelock Educational Policy Center, and MIT Blueprint labs. Before joining the economics department at Brown, Jesse spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow in the Industrial Relations Section at Princeton University. Prior to life as an economist, Jesse spent four years on active duty in the United States Army and one year as a Mathematics Educator in the Springfield, Massachusetts, public school system.

Jesse's research focuses on how economic forces shape outcomes for young Americans. His work explores the impact of parental choices in schooling markets on student success; the role of gangs in shaping the neighborhood environment where children grow up; and the impact that military service in Iraq and Afghanistan had on the later-life well-being (disability, incarceration, financial health, deaths of despair) of newly enlisted soldiers in the United States Army. Recently, Jesse has been developing new methods for measuring student success that leverage artificial intelligence algorithms to detect patterns of performance in student test score data that are more closely linked to meaningful measures of adult well-being like college attendance and earnings.