Dr. Boffy-Ramirez has been an Associate Professor CTT in the Department of Economics at the University of Colorado Denver since 2021.

Before this, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor from 2012-2015 and an Assistant Professor CTT from 2015-2021. He received his Ph.D. from the University of California Santa Barbara in 2012. His research focuses on topics within the area of applied labor economics and specifically those related to educational attainment, low-wage workers, migration decisions, and labor mobility.

In his work on US immigrants, Dr. Boffy-Ramirez finds that recent immigrants are mobile in response to differences in minimum wages across states. In related research, he finds that measures of immigrant educational attainment are systematically downward biased due to the mechanical grouping of educational categories at the low end of the education distribution.

In more recent work, he shows that educational decisions as a teenager are countercyclical and eventually lead to long-term differences in educational attainment across age cohorts. He identifies teens on the margin between educational decisions who are pushed into additional education due to decreasing opportunity costs.

Currently, he is continuing his work on the impacts of the minimum wage by looking at the short-run impacts of the minimum wage using 4-month individual panels. This work finds that in the short-run, labor force participation is the relevant labor market outcome to focus on.

Dr. Boffy-Ramirez spends 3-4 months per year teaching and conducting research in China at the University of Colorado Denver International College in Beijing. While in Beijing, he has studied how the Chinese household registry system relates to growing income inequality. He is also pursuing ongoing research related to the impact of Chinese air pollution on worker productivity and child education.

Ernest Boffy-Ramirez joined IZA as a Research Affiliate in July 2016 and is currently a Research Fellow.