Charles Becker (BA, Grinnell; PhD Princeton) joined the Duke faculty in 2003, where he directed the American Economic Association’s Summer Program and Minority Scholarship Program (2003-2007). He currently directs the MS program in Economics and Computation run jointly by the Departments of Computer Science and Economics. Becker previously taught at CU-Denver, Vanderbilt, and CU-Boulder. In 2007, he was recognized as a lifetime member of the American Economic Association (AEA) for service to the profession; in 2019 he received the AEA’s Committee on the Status of Minority Groups in the Economics Profession’s mentorship award. He received Duke’s equity, inclusion and diversity award in 2008 and graduate faculty mentoring award in 2014.
Becker is interested in exploring the economies of such countries as Kazakhstan, India, sub-Saharan Africa, Russia, and Kyrgyzstan. His research has focused on economic demography, social security system forecasting, CGE modeling, mortality and disability risk, determinants of health care utilization, computable general equilibrium simulation modeling, and urban economics. His on-going projects involve assessing infant mortality rates, poverty in developing countries, accidental deaths in middle-income countries, and the performance of minority students in Economics doctoral programs. He recently worked with Irina Merkuryeva on a project investigating, “Disability Risk and Miraculous Recoveries in Russia,” and with Rebecca Anthopolos on, “Gobal Infant Mortality: Initial results from a cross-country infant mortality comparison project.” He also collaborated with Grigory Marchenko, Sabit Khakimzhanov, Ai-Gul Seitenova, and Vladimir Ivliev on a project entitled, “Social Secutiry Reform in Transition Economies: Lessons from Kazakhstan,” and with Amitava Krishna Dutt and Jaime Ros on, “Urbanization and Rural-Urban Migration.”
