Heather Royer (born ) is an American economist who is a professor of economics at the

University of California, Santa Barbara The University of California, Santa Barbara (UC Santa Barbara or UCSB) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Santa Barbara County, California, United States. Tracing its roots back to 1891 as an ...

and a Research Associate of the

National Bureau of Economic Research The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) is an American private nonprofit research organization "committed to undertaking and disseminating unbiased economic research among public policymakers, business professionals, and the academic co ...

. She has been an Associate Editor of ''

The Journal of Human Resources ''The Journal of Human Resources'' is a bimonthly peer-reviewed academic journal covering empirical microeconomics. It was established in 1965 and is published by The University of Wisconsin Press. The editor-in-chief is Anna Aizer (Brown Univers ...

'', the ''

Journal of Health Economics The ''Journal of Health Economics'' is a peer-reviewed academic journal that publishes articles about health economics and related fields concerning human health care and medicine. The journal is published six times annually by Elsevier. The edit ...

'', and the ''

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization The ''Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization'' is an academic journal published by Elsevier. It was started in 1980 by North-Holland, later merged into Elsevier. It publishes research on economic decision and behaviour influence organizati ...

'', and will become coeditor of the '' AEA Journal of Economic Policy'' in September 2021. She was a member of the women's team that set a world record in a swimming relay from

Palos Verdes The Palos Verdes Peninsula () is a peninsular subregion of the Los Angeles metropolitan area, located within southwestern Los Angeles County, California. It is often called simply "Palos Verdes", and is made up of a group of cities in the Palos ...

to Santa Catalina Island in 1994, and swam the

English Channel The English Channel, also known as the Channel, is an arm of the Atlantic Ocean that separates Southern England from northern France. It links to the southern part of the North Sea by the Strait of Dover at its northeastern end. It is the busi ...

in 1999. She is a member of the Alaska Swimming Hall of Fame.

Research

Royer's research focuses on causal inference in

health economics Health economics is a branch of economics concerned with issues related to Health care efficiency, efficiency, effectiveness, value and behavior in the production and consumption of health and healthcare. Health economics is important in dete ...

. She has studied how education affects health using variation induced by school-entry and

compulsory schooling Compulsory education refers to a period of education that is required of all people and is imposed by the government. This education may take place at a registered school or at home or other places. Compulsory school attendance or compulsory sc ...

policies in the U.S. and in England. In work with Stefanie Fischer and Corey White, she studied the effects of the closure of rural obstetrical units on infant and maternal health. The research reveals that while closures caused people to travel further in search of care, the care they received was of higher quality. In work with Mariana Carrera, she also found that commitment contracts, which offered people funds to go to the gym during a three-month experiment period, were effective at motivating people to develop a habit of gym-going that lasted for years after the experiment ended.

Selected works

* McCrary, Justin, and Heather Royer. "The effect of female education on fertility and infant health: evidence from school entry policies using exact date of birth." American economic review 101, no. 1 (2011): 158–95. * Clark, Damon, and Heather Royer. "The effect of education on adult mortality and health: Evidence from Britain." American Economic Review 103, no. 6 (2013): 2087–2120. * Royer, Heather. "Separated at girth: US twin estimates of the effects of birth weight." American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 1, no. 1 (2009): 49–85. * Royer, Heather, Mark Stehr, and Justin Sydnor. "Incentives, commitments, and habit formation in exercise: evidence from a field experiment with workers at a fortune-500 company." American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 7, no. 3 (2015): 51–84. * Carrera, Mariana, Heather Royer, Mark Stehr, Justin Sydnor, and Dmitry Taubinsky. "The limits of simple implementation intentions: Evidence from a field experiment on making plans to exercise." Journal of health economics 62 (2018): 95–104. * Stefanie Fischer, Heather Royer, and Corey White. "Health Care Centralization: The Health Impacts of Obstetric Unit Closures in the US." Forthcoming, NBER Working Paper 30141 (2022).

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Royer, Heather American women economists 21st-century American economists American labor economists American health economists University of California, Santa Barbara faculty Living people University of California, Berkeley alumni Pomona College alumni People from Fairbanks, Alaska Year of birth missing (living people) 21st-century American women