Citizenship United States Field Economic history | Doctoral advisor Ronald Lee Institution Ohio State University | |
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Fields Economics
Economic History Institutions The Ohio State University Alma maters University of Wisconsin-Madison, University of California, Berkeley | ||
Trevon D. Logan is the Hazel C. Youngberg Trustees Distinguished Professor in the Department of Economics at The Ohio State University and is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is the youngest-ever president of the National Economics Association, and was awarded the 2014 Alumni Award for Distinguished Teaching. His research mainly focuses on economic history, including studies of African American migration, economic analysis of illegal markets, the economics of marriage transfers, and measures of historical living standards.
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Life
Logan comes from an African-American family with roots in the sharecropping economy of the southern United States. He received his B.S. in economics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1999 as a Chancellor's Scholar, M.A. degrees in economics and demography from the University of California, Berkeley in 2003, and his PhD in economics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2004. He was awarded tenure as a professor of economics at the age of 32. He has held visiting positions at Princeton University's Center for Health and Well-Being and was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Scholar in Health Policy Research at the University of Michigan. Outside of his university positions, he serves on the board of a network of charter schools, and is active in Columbus-area HIV prevention organizations.
Research
Logan specializes in economic history, economic demography and applied microeconomics.
His research in economic history concerns the development of living standards measures to assess how the human condition has changed over time. He applies techniques of contemporary living standard measurements to the past to derive consistent estimates of well-being over time. Much of his historical work uses historical household surveys, but also includes some new data to examine area such as the returns to education in the early twentieth century, the formation of tastes, and the allocation of resources within the household.
His economic demography research agenda includes a variety of projects. In one project, with Raj Arunachalam, he examines dowries in South Asia to see if the purpose of dowry has changed over time. In another project, with Manisha Shah and Chih-Sheng Hsieh, he studies the economic, social and health implications of male sex work. This work examines the value of information in this illegal market, uses econometric techniques to quantitatively test sociological theories of gender and masculinity, and looks at the role of public health in causing decreases in disease transmission among these men.
Logan has also worked on the economics of sports with Rodney J. Andrews, Kyle J. Kain, and Michael J. Sinkey. He has looked at bias in the college football betting market, deriving stronger tests for the use of the betting market as a prediction market, and testing for behavioral biases in college football poll rankings.
In his presidential address to the NEA, Logan used records from his own family to talk about productivity and living standards in the Jim crow era in the American South, arguing for a greater role of qualitative research in driving the focus of empirical study.