Anita Alves Pena is a Professor of Economics at Colorado State University and is currently the Director of Graduate Studies in the Economics Department. Her research spans labor, development, immigration, inequality, agricultural economics, and public policy, with a longstanding emphasis on how social structures shape economic opportunity and well-being. Her current work centers on two complementary areas that have each become passion projects at this point in my career. The first brings economic theory and empirical methods to the study of agricultural worker health and safety, including the economic consequences of workplace risks, employer responses to regulation and environmental change, and the costs and benefits of interventions designed to protect workers. The second area focuses on stratification economics, including the development of global stratification economics as a framework for understanding how group-based inequalities are produced and sustained across different historical and national contexts.
