Catherine Haeck

Catherine Haeck is a Full Professor at the Economics Department at the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM), one of the largest departments in Canada, with active research in all areas of economics. She completed her doctoral studies in economics at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in Belgium. She is trained in causal inference and microeconometrics. Prior to that, she worked for several years for General Electric in Toronto (Canada) and Brussels (Belgium). She is a professor at UQAM since 2012 and the Academic Director of the CIQSS-UQAM-INRS laboratory since 2016. She is an invited researcher at the Quebec Inter-University Centre for Social Statistics, a research fellow at the CIRANO Research Centre and an affiliated researcher for the Education Policy Research Initiative. She is a member of the Groupe de recherche sur l'inadaptation psychosociale chez l'enfant (GRIP CHU Ste-Justine). She is also a member of the Obesity prevention committee at the National Institute for Public Health and a member of the scientific committee of the OLO Foundation.
Her research focuses on the human capital development of children and youth. Her goal is to understand which programs and intervention best help children attain their full potential using causal inference techniques. She recently received the « Prix de la Relève de l’ESG » for her overall achievement on the research front. Her current research focuses on the geographical and temporal evolution of intergenerational mobility in Canada compared to the United States with an aim to better understand the causal relationship between education and mobility. She has written about the impact of the pandemic on children’s academic success and on parental employment. She also collaborated to the development of a COVID risk assessment tool with the Vancouver School of Economics. Finally, she has written about universal childcare, prenatal nutrition programs, parental leave reforms, school reforms, class sizes and the taxation of sweet beverages. Her work on children was featured in several media outlets and government reports. She has two children who are a source of inspiration and motivation for her work.