Maria Mora received the 2022 Academic Achievement Award from the American Society of Hispanic Economists. (Photo by August Jennewein)
Marie Mora is a founding member of the American Society of Hispanic Economists, and she served as the organization’s president when it created an Academic Achievement Award to recognize the impact of members on research and scholarship.
Mora, now the associate vice chancellor for strategic initiatives and professor of economics at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, didn’t expect she’d one day be receiving the recognition for her own work.
So she was caught by surprise when she received an email letting her know she’d been chosen the 2022 recipient of the Academic Achievement Award. It was presented to her on Jan. 7 during the ASHE business meeting at the Allied Social Science Association meetings – the annual conference of the American Economic Association – which was held virtually because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It was a huge honor,” Mora said. “I am very excited and honored to have been selected, especially given the caliber and significant impact of previous recipients. ”
The selection committee for the award includes some of the previous recipients of the award going back to when it was first presented in 2008.
Mora isn’t sure who nominated her, but her credentials are easily recognized. She has studied and written extensively on the labor market outcomes of Hispanics in the United States for more than 25 years. Specifically, she’s focused on Hispanic entrepreneurship, educational attainment, earnings differentials and the effect of English fluency on socioeconomic outcomes, and she has received more than $4 million in external grants as either principal investigator or co-principal investigator since 2006.
Her work has appeared in more than 55 refereed journal articles and book chapters, including in such outlets as the “American Economic Review P&P,” “Industrial Relations,” “Journal of Population Economics,” “Social Science Quarterly” and “International Migration Review.”
Among the books she’s co-edited or co-authored, “Hispanic Entrepreneurs in the 2000s: An Economic Profile and Policy Implications,” published by Stanford University Press, received the 2014 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award.
More recently, Mora has written about Puerto Rico’s severe economic crisis and net outmigration, including in her co-edited book “Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico: Disaster, Vulnerability & Resiliency,” published by Lexington Books last October.
Mora has also been invited to share her research expertise with the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics, the White House Council of Economic Advisers, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas and other Federal Reserve District Banks, and the U.S. Department of Labor, among other agencies and institutions.
She’s currently the lead co-PI working on the National Science Foundation ADVANCE grant UMSL received in 2020 aimed at making organizational changes to address gender equity and better recruit and retain women – particularly women of color – in faculty positions in STEM and social and behavioral sciences.
