Joseph Melkonian

Joseph Melkonian is a PhD student at the Harvard Kennedy School whose research focuses on economic development and migration, particularly in the North African context. Joseph’s personal experience growing up between Morocco and California shaped his research interests and nurtured a love of couscous and cross-cultural environments. He assists Gordon Hanson and Enrico Moretti in their analysis of the evolution of regional US labor markets for the Reimagining the Economy Project at HKS. Earlier in his PhD he spent a summer at the Morocco Employment Lab, a JPAL/EPOD affiliate directed by Professor Rema Hanna, analyzing household survey data on labor market conditions, and studied Moroccan Darija in Rabat through a FLAS scholarship. Before coming to Harvard, Joseph majored in economics and international relations at University of California, Davis and worked for two years as a research assistant at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.