ASHE Leadership

Salvador Contreras is Professor and Associate Dean for Graduate and Professional Programs as the Robert C. Vackar College of Business & Entrepreneurship at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Salvador’s research is in the intersection of financial intermediation and society. His current work explores financial frictions and their effect on entrepreneurship, income mobility, and access to financial markets.

Dr. Feliciano is a Professor at Queens College and a faculty member at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She is the codirector of the Latin American and Latino Studies Program at Queens College. She is also a Research Economist in the Program of International Trade and Investment at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Her research is on international trade, foreign direct investment, and migration.

Francisca Antman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is a development and labor economist with research interests in international migration, human capital investments, intrahousehold resource allocation, economic history, and disparities across groups defined by gender, race, and ethnic identities.

Anita Alves Pena is a Professor of Economics at Colorado State University. Her research interests are in public sector economics, labor economics, and economic development and her current research relates to undocumented and documented immigration, public policy, poverty, education/skill, and agricultural labor markets including applications to public and occupational health.

Dr. Blanco is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at Illinois State University. He joined the faculty at Illinois State in 2013 right after completing his Ph.D. studies from the State University of New York at Binghamton. Dr. Blanco’s research interests include Labor Economics, Applied Econometrics, and the Econometrics of Program Evaluation. His most notable work appears in the Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, the Journal of Human Resources, Econometric Reviews, and the Journal of Productivity Analysis. His work on active labor market programs, including job training for youth, has been presented nationally, e.g., Society of Labor Economists, and the Midwest Econometrics Group, and internationally, e.g., University of Luxembourg, the Luxembourg Institute for Socio-Economic Research, and the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) at Bonn, Germany. Dr. Blanco has served as a professional referee for the Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, Journal of Applied Econometrics, Industrial and Labor Relations Review, Journal of Labor Research and for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada), among others. His teaching interests include Principles of Economics, Economic Reasoning Using Statistics, Advanced Labor Economics, and Fundamentals of Econometrics (at the undergraduate and graduate levels).