Professor James Heckman
Professor Heckman is leading a collaborative research initiative into intervention design between the UCD Geary Institute and the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, funded in part by Atlantic Foundation and the Irish Government through the PRTLI.
In his current research, Professor Heckman draws on neuroscience to demonstrate that factors including earnings, employment, college attendance, teenage pregnancy and participation in crime, strongly depend on cognitive and non-cognitive abilities. In other words, they depend on the person’s formal skills and their personality traits. Influencing these personality traits (such as socialisation) has as much an impact as formal education, on these later life outcomes. Heckman has taken a very strong interest in the economic benefits of investment in early child wellbeing. His work shows that the early childhood environment has a direct influence on the subsequent economic success of that child into adulthood. And he argues that early intervention lowers the cost of later investment.
