From Tax Policy to Health Outcomes: Londoño-Vélez Awarded Sloan Fellowship
CCPR Affiliate and Assistant Professor, Juliana Londoño-Vélez, has been named a 2026 Sloan Research Fellow in Economics. The prestigious Sloan Prize is awarded annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to early-career scholars whose work shows exceptional promise and creativity. Since 1955, the Sloan Research Fellowship has identified rising leaders across scientific disciplines, providing flexible funding that enables scholars to pursue ambitious, innovative research agendas. As a Sloan Fellow, Londoño-Vélez joins a distinguished cohort of scholars whose work is redefining the frontiers of economic research.
Londoño-Vélez’s research examines how tax systems and social policies, spanning wealth taxation, higher education, and reproductive health, can reduce inequality, promote upward mobility, and shape long-term economic and health outcomes.
One domain of her research examines the limits and possibilities of redistributive taxation. Her work examines how governments can tax individuals at the very high end of the wealth distribution, particularly in settings where tax enforcement is limited. By identifying government constraints to redistribution and evaluating how targeted interventions shape the trajectories of individuals, this research advances a clearer understanding of how tax systems can increase equity while remaining administratively viable and economically sound.
A second area of Londoño-Vélez’s research investigates financial aid as a tool to overcome credit market imperfections that depress human capital investment. Studying a financial aid program in Colombia that targeted high-achieving students from low socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds, she finds that the program substantially increased college enrollment, particularly in high-quality institutions:
“In the long run, access to these higher quality institutions improved low SES students’ cognitive skills and earnings, narrowing the nationwide gap that existed in educational and labor market outcomes.”
These gains did not come at the expense of higher-SES peers, demonstrating that equity and efficiency can move in tandem. Building on this insight, she examines how governments should design financial aid policy to balance a potential trade-off between equity and efficiency. Since most policies rely on both test scores and socioeconomic status, and these measures are often inversely correlated, prioritizing high achievement may not necessarily capture those who might be the most disadvantaged students.
Looking ahead, Londoño-Vélez is expanding this research to study the non-pecuniary returns to attending selective universities. While most research measures success in terms of earnings and employment, she argues that higher education also shapes health, civic engagement, job quality, family formation, and subjective well-being. To address longstanding data and identification challenges, she has designed and fielded a new survey to estimate the long-run causal effects of selective university attendance on these broader life outcomes. With data collection complete, she is now beginning analysis.
Another research agenda examines the consequences of access to reproductive health care for women’s welfare and family well-being. Interestingly, Londoño-Vélez finds that “abortions are common, with at least one in four women having an abortion in their lifetime, yet more than 40 percent of women of reproductive age live under restrictive laws.” To identify causal effects, she leverages a unique institutional feature in Colombia: abortion cases are randomly assigned to judges, and male judges are substantially more likely to deny claimants access to an abortion. Her findings show that being denied a wanted abortion has immediate and long-lasting consequences for the women and their children. It increases unsafe procedures and raises the risk of death in the nine months following denial. Over the longer term, women who are denied abortions experience worse self-reported health, lower educational attainment, reduced labor force participation, and lower household earnings.
Compellingly, many of the women seeking abortions were already mothers, and when abortion denial reduces household earnings, the consequences extend to their existing children: these children are more likely to be raised in poverty and to rely on public assistance. They are also less likely to remain in school and more likely to enter the labor force earlier than they otherwise would have. In other words, the effects of abortion denial spill over to the next generation, reinforcing cycles of disadvantage and increasing fiscal pressures on the state.
In new work, Londoño-Vélez is extending this investigation to establish causality between being denied a wanted abortion and physical and mental health outcomes by linking judicial records to nationwide administrative health data in Colombia.
