Think. Pair. Share. with Dr. Chloe Gibbs

From apple picking and pumpkin patches to community building and examining the economics of education in pursuit of better outcomes for disadvantaged children and families. 

Dr. Chloe Gibbs, Director of Notre Dame’s Program for Interdisciplinary Educational Research (ND PIER) and Assistant Professor of Economics, discusses the importance of rigorous, relevant, and impactful policy research as the critical foundation in deciding which interventions and social programs are worth the investment to her thoughts on superstitions, bobbing for apples, and Halloween candy outliers.

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Notable Quotes

  • “The way the mission, both of Notre Dame as an institution and of IEI feeds into my work is in thinking about how we get to a place of equitable outcomes for children, and how we get to a place of human flourishing where children are reaching their fullest potential because of the kinds of services supports, the structures that we put in place to make that happen.”

  • “Economics is, to me, a set of tools and a lens for looking at the world and understanding a variety of problems and potential solutions to those problems, and so for me, it was more of a perspective of how we approach puzzles that we see in the world. // It was really that set of both theoretical tools and then empirical tools to take the theory to data and actually test these questions that we were interested in. It's always a bit confusing to people that I study education, but I'm an economist. "And how do those work? Don't you study the stock market?" And I always say to that that if economics was only about the stock market and inflation and monetary policy, those kinds of questions, it really would not be the right place for me. It was really the economist toolkit for understanding social problems, for understanding the kinds of policies that we leverage to address those problems and whether or not they're working, that really drew me in.