Jennifer Cohen

Jennifer Cohen's teaching and research is in the economics of inequality, particularly in labor and health. She is interested in workers in the healthcare sector and in academia, mental health, and connections between paid work and unpaid reproductive labor.

Teaching

Jennifer Cohen teaches courses on economic development and inequality; gender, race, and class; and work. Before joining the faculty at Miami University, Dr. Cohen was an Assistant Professor of Economics at Whitman College.

Research

Jennifer Cohen is an economist whose research focuses on labor markets, precarity, and women's work in the US and South Africa. A new study surveyed 4,500 Direct Support Professionals in New York State and considers the experiences of workers who provide support for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD). Research on Long COVID is published in the International Journal for Equity in Health, International Journal of Health Policy and Management, and the Journal of Occupational Health and Rehabilitation. Interview-based research with nurses on the demands for care work is published in PLOS ONE and has contributed to publications in Preventive Medicine, Global Public Health, AIDS, Public Health Ethics, Gender, Work & Organization. 

Collaboration

Dr. Cohen is a joint researcher with Ezintsha in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Selected Publications

• Cohen J. and van der Meulen Rodgers Y. An Intersectional Analysis of Long COVID Prevalence, International Journal for Equity in Health. 22:261. 2024.
• van der Meulen Rodgers Y. and Cohen J. Long COVID Prevalence, Disability, and Accommodations: Analysis Across Demographic Groups. Journal of Occupational Health and Rehabilitation. (in press)
• Cohen J. Economics and the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD). The Handbook of the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease and Society: Past, Present and Future Directions of Biosocial Collaboration. Cambridge University Press. (in press)
• Hartmann H, and Cohen J. Feminist Political Economy. Encyclopedia entry. Encyclopedia of the Left. Verso. (in press)
• Cohen J. The Values of the Care Economy. Comment on “Ensuring Global Health Equity in a Post-pandemic Economy,” International Journal of Health Policy and Management. 12: 7762. 2023.
• Cohen J. Precarity of Subsistence: Social Reproduction among South African Nurses, Feminist Economics. 29(1):236-265. 2023.
• Cohen J. and H. Hartmann. Feminist Political Economy. Handbook of Alternative Theories of Political Economy, (eds.) Stillwell, F., D. Primrose, T. Thornton. Cheltenham: Elgar, (96-109). 2022.
• Cohen J. The Queen of the Social Sciences: The Reproduction of a [White] ‘Man’s Field,’ History of Political Economy. 54(6): 10085730. 2022.
• Cohen J, Rodgers Y. The feminist political economy of Covid-19: Capitalism, women, and work, Global Public Health. 16(8-9):1381-1395. 2021.
• Cohen J. The Feminist Political Economy of Health Justice. Bill of Health, the site for digital symposia for the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics. Harvard Law School. 2021.
• Cohen J, Rodgers Y. Contributing factors to personal protective equipment shortages during the COVID-19 pandemic, Preventive Medicine. 141:106263. 2020.
• Cohen J. COVID-19 capitalism: the profit motive versus public health, Public Health Ethics. 13(2): 176-8. 2020.
• Cohen J. Theorizing Entrepreneurial Price Gouging: Interdependency, Injustice, and Hand Sanitizer. Rethinking Marxism. 2020.
• Bahn K, Cohen J, van der Meulen Rodgers Y. A Feminist Perspective on COVID-19 and the Value of Care Work Globally, Gender, Work & Organization. 27(5): 695-9. 2020.
• Cohen J, Venter WDF. The integration of occupational- and household-based chronic stress among South African women employed as public hospital nurses, PLoS ONE 15(5): e0231693. 2020.
• Cohen J, Pepperrell T, Venter WDF. The same lesson over and over: Drugs alone will not get us to 90-90-90, AIDS, 34(6): 943-946. 2020.
• Cohen J. Feminist Political Economy and the Heterodoxy, The American Review of Political Economy, 14(1). 2020.

Education

• Ph.D., Economics, University of Massachusetts
• M.A., Economics,  University of Massachusetts
• M.A., Political Science, University of Arizona
• B.S., Florida State University