Dr. Nicole Fortin
Congratulations to VSE Full Professor Nicole Fortin on winning a prestigious UBC Killam Research Prize!
Winners of these peer-nominated awards were selected by UBC’s Faculty Research Award Committee, reviewing nominations spanning arts and humanities, business, education, applied science, science, and medicine. Nicole won in the Senior Category, which acknowledges the cumulative and outstanding contributions she has made to economics research and academia.
Notably, Dr. Fortin contributed to the ground-breaking research presented in the 2015 World Happiness Report by looking at how gender and age affect feelings of happiness for individuals, and societal well-being overall, across the globe. One of her findings was that women in Canada show higher life-satisfaction levels than Canadian men at a level that is statistically significant. Her research, and the work of the other contributors to the report, is now being considered as a game-changer for governments internationally when they consider policies for the well-being of their citizens.
At the VSE, Dr. Fortin teaches courses in labour economics and empirical economics, at the graduate and undergraduate levels. She joined UBC in 1999 after teaching for ten years at the Université de Montréal.
Her research is focussed on three main streams of interest:
- wage inequality and its links to labour market institutions and public policies, including higher education policies
- the economic progress of women, gender equality policies, and gender issues in education, and
- contributions to decomposition methods, namely the widely used DFL reweighting decomposition methodology and the newer RIF (recentered influence function) regression methodology, both published in Econometrica.
To read more about UBC’s Faculty Research Awards and a complete list of winners in all categories, please click here.
