Panka Bencsik

Panka Bencsik received her Ph. D. in Economics from the University of Sussex in 2019. During her dissertation research, she was a Fulbright Fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. Before joining Vanderbilt, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Chicago, Urban Labs.

Dr. Bencsik is an applied microeconomist. She studies the economics of health, mental health, and substance use. Her work to date has focused on the impacts of the opioid crisis, what influences nutritional choices, how individuals’ mental health is impacted by external stressors, and how health carries forward intergenerationally. Additionally, she studies the US criminal justice system, including how policies can simultaneously avert incarceration and increase public safety, and the impacts of gun violence. Her research focuses on combining causal inference with addressing policy-relevant questions.

Dr. Bencsik is the founding leader of the world’s largest research hub on mental health economics.

Her research has appeared in Economica, Small Business Economics, and the Journal of Housing Economics, and was covered by major media outlets, including The Economist, the Chicago Sun Times, and Fast Company and by policy makers, such as the Mayor’s Office of Chicago.