Joseph Marchand is a Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. He currently serves as Principal Investigator for a generous grant from the Canada First Research Excellence Fund, examining what the future of energy means for labor markets, which is part of the Future Energy Systems initiative at the University of Alberta. He also recently served as Chair of the Minimum Wage Expert Panel for the Government of Alberta, to assess the impacts of the province’s $15 minimum wage and the elimination of the liquor server differential. He has held visiting positions at the Grantham Institute of the London School of Economics, the Department of Economics at the University of Toronto, and the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin.

Professor Marchand primarily conducts research within his field of labor economics. Some of this research examines how local labor demand shocks, such as energy booms and busts, can generate labor market responses (such as in employment and earnings), distributional responses (such as in inequality and poverty), educational responses (such as in student test scores and teacher quality), and health outcomes (such as in disability and mortality). This local labor market research has been published in the Canadian Journal of Economics, the Journal of Economic Surveys, the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, the Journal of Urban Economics, and Labour Economics. He has also published research examining the economics of aging in Economics Letters, the Handbook of the Economics of Population Aging, and the Journal of Gerontology.

In addition, Professor Marchand is currently writing a textbook on labor economics, which will be the first Canadian edition of Labor Economics: Principles in Practice. This book is the result of previous and current teaching in his field of labor economics, at both the undergraduate (ECON 331 and 431) and graduate (ECON 531) levels. He has additionally taught intermediate microeconomics (ECON 281), continues to conduct a graduate research workshop (ECON 591), and has previously coordinated the graduate research program (ECON 900), while supervising many other independent student research projects. Joseph also continues to serve as the editor of his department’s working paper series and the weekly New Economics Papers reports in the areas of labour economics and labor markets – supply, demand, and wages.

Prior to joining the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta, Joseph received his doctorate in economics from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University (where the social sciences are uniquely embedded within the policy school), a master’s degree in economics from New York University, and a bachelor’s degree in economics from Rutgers University, where he graduated as a Henry Rutgers Scholar with dual Honors. Throughout his higher education, Joseph had continuously worked as a Research Associate in the Center for Policy Research at Syracuse University, and as a Research Assistant in the School of Social Work at Columbia University and the Office of Population Research at Princeton University.

Although the Canadian province of Alberta has been home for more than fourteen years, Joseph is very much a product of the northeastern United States, having been born in the state of Massachusetts, and raised, educated, and employed in the states of New Jersey (i.e. Rutgers, Princeton) and New York (i.e. NYU, Columbia, Syracuse). Despite his American upbringing, Joseph is proud of his Canadian ancestry (tracing his family back through Quebec to at least the 1700s), his dual citizenship, and his broadened geographical scope across a greater North America. After all, living the Canadian dream is much like the American one (only slightly colder, a bit more francophone, and most likely denominated in Canadian rather than American dollars).