Senior Economist and Director, Promising Practices Network on Children, Families and Communities, RAND

Dr Rebecca Kilburn is a senior economist at the RAND Corporation and the director of the Promising Practices Network on Children, Families and Communities (www.promisingpractices.net), a website project that identifies, screens, and presents information about effective interventions for children and families.

Her research focuses on the effects of public and private investments in children. She co-authored Investing in Our Children, RAND's pathbreaking 1998 report that contained some of the original cost-benefit analysis of early childhood interventions. Subsequent publications synthesized evaluations of early childhood interventions, including home visiting programs, to generate estimates of pooled effect sizes, identify features of effective programs, and estimate costs and government savings produced by these interventions. A recent project, funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), tested economic hypotheses regarding whether parents invest more in children with relatively higher endowments or lower endowments and the relative effect of early parental investments in children on children's later achievement scores and other outcomes.

Dr Kilburn is currently conducting a study of home visiting in New Mexico on features that promote successful start-up of home visiting sites across the state and a randomized trial impact evaluation of a home visiting program in Santa Fe County. Another ongoing NIH-funded study examines the relationship between state laws requiring booster seat use for children over age 4 and rates of auto injuries and fatalities for children. Kilburn received her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago.