Victor Chaim Lavy is an Israeli economist and professor at the University of Warwick and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His research interests include labour economics, the economics of education, and development economics. Lavy belongs to the most prominent education economists in the world.
Biography
Victor Lavy earned a B.A. in economics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1974, followed by a M.A. and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago in 1977 and 1979, respectively. Since his graduation, Lavy has continuously worked at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, first as a lecturer in economics (1979–84), then as a senior lecturer (1985–89), before becoming a professor in 1990 and being made the William Haber Professor of Economics in 1997. In parallel, Lavy worked and continues to work in the United Kingdom, where he was a chaired professor of economics first at Royal Holloway, University of London (2006–11) and has been holding the same position at the University of Warwick since 2011. Additionally, Lavy has held visiting appointments at the University of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Centre for Economic Performance (LSE), Stanford University and the Hoover Institution.
Lavy maintains a number of academic affiliations, including with the Bureau for Research in the Economic Analysis of Development (BREAD), where he is a board member, and NBER, CEPR, CEP, IZA, and the IGC, where he holds positions as research fellow or associate. Moreover, Lavy is member of the AEA, Econometric Society, Royal Economic Society, and Society of Labor Economists. Besides his academic career, Lavy has repeatedly worked as an economist and consultant for the World Bank as well as for Israel's Ministry of Education. Finally, he also performs editorial duties at the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics (since 2016) and at Labour Economics (since 2006) and has done so in the past for Economic Development and Cultural Change.
Research
Victor Lavy's research interests include labour economics, development economics and the economics of education. According to IDEAS/RePEc, Victor Lavy belongs to the top 2% of most cited economists worldwide. Many of Lavy's publications are co-authored with Joshua Angrist and typically exploit natural experiments to estimate economic outcomes such as the returns to schooling. In particular, cooperations between Lavy and Angrist of that type include Lavy's highest cited article - Using Maimonides' Rule to Estimate the Effect of Class Size on Children's Academic Achievement, for which Lavy and Angrist received the 2nd place at the 2000 Griliches Prize for Empirical Economics.
Development economics
Throughout the mid-1990s, Lavy performed field research on health and education in several developing countries, including Morocco, Côte d'Ivoire, Pakistan, and Ghana. Analysing how the quality of healthcare in Ghana affects the health of rural children, he (together with John Strauss, Duncan Thomas and Philippe de Vreyer) finds that making birth services and other related child programmes more widely available and improving water and sanitation infrastructure would likely strongly reduce the mortality rates of children in rural areas. In another study in Ghana, wherein Lavy studies the effect of introducing gradually increasing school fees, he finds that the schedule of these fees affects schoolchildren's educational choices in lower grades. In the Côte d'Ivoire, Lavy, Thomas and Strauss analyse the impact of economic adjustment programmes implemented in the 1980s and find that these programmes likely adversely affected the health of Ivorians by making health care services - especially immunizations - less available as well as of poorer quality and by increasing relative food prices. In Morocco, Angrist and Lavy exploit the change of Morocco's language of instruction from French to Arabic in 1983 to estimate the returns to learning French and find that the policy substantially reduced young Moroccans' returns to schooling by deteriorating their French writing skills. Finally, in Pakistan, Lavy, Harold Alderman, Jere R. Behrman and Rekha Menon investigate the impact of child health (proxied by nutrition) on school enrollment and find the effect of child health to be three times as large as conventional estimates in the literature suggest when child health is taken to be exogenous instead of being the result of households' decision.