Joaquin Alfredo-Angel Rubalcaba
Joaquín Alfredo-Angel Rubalcaba's research aims to uncover the inequalities that cut across race, ethnicity, gender and class, and is primarily situated within health and labor economics. His research has ranged from studies on how immigration policies influence labor market behavior, ethnic discrimination, and access to health care to estimating the economic value of racial inequalities.
Dr. Rubalcaba is a first-year Assistant Professor in the Department of Public Policy at UNC. He earned his PhD in Economics from the University of New Mexico, after serving for six years in the U.S. Air Force (Honorably Discharged in 2010). Dr. Rubalcaba in an economic demographer working on health, well-being and labor market outcomes of vulnerable groups in the U.S. His dissertation applies demographic techniques to predict immigration status in U.S. population-based data sets such as the Current Population Survey and the American Community Survey. He uses this empirical framework to assess the effects of public policies on documented and undocumented immigrants. Beyond the health and well-being of immigrants, Dr. Rubalcaba has a growing research agenda that focuses on the well-being of veterans. As a PhD student at University of New Mexico, Dr. Rubalcaba was a pre-doctoral trainee at the Robert Wood Johnson Center for Health Policy Research, and thus has experience working in a multidisciplinary research environment with scholars from different disciplines. As a PhD student, Dr. Rubalcaba also participated in the American Economic Association Summer Training Program designed for students from underrepresented groups in the Economics profession, and he currently serves on the Policy Council of the Association for Public Policy and Management (APPAM), the main professional society in the Public Policy discipline.