Krishna Pendakur honoured as 2023 Distinguished SFU Professor

Simon Fraser University's Department of Economics is proud to announce that Professor Krishna Pendakur is one of nine SFU researchers awarded a 2023 Distinguished SFU Professorship.

Pendakur's research focuses on the measurement of well-being, poverty, discrimination and inequality. He is also interested in consumer demand and semi-parametric and non-parametric econometrics. In 2022 he won the prestigious John Rae Prize which is awarded biannually to the Canadian economist with the best research record during the last 5 years.

Over the course of his 30-year research career, Pendakur has changed the landscape of the economics of discrimination in Canada. In the 1990s, discrimination against ethnic minorities in Canada was essentially unstudied. His landmark paper The Colour of Money: Earnings Differentials Among Ethnic Groups in Canada, co-authored with his brother Ravi Pendakur and published in 1998, opened this field of research and has since been cited more than 500 times.

Pendakur was also one of the first economists to study Indigenous issues in Canada, publishing the groundbreaking article Aboriginal Income Disparity in Canada (Pendakur and Pendakur 2011). He was a founding member of the Indigenous Economics Study Goup supported by the Canadian Economics Association, and he remains part of an active community of researchers in this field.  

The Distinguished SFU Professor program recognizes research faculty members who have achieved exceptional performance and distinguished accomplishments relative to their rank and years of service. The program is a joint initiative of Simon Fraser University’s Vice-President, Academic and Provost and the Vice-President, Research and International.

Congratulations, Krishna!