Her primary areas of research include economics of education and religion, family studies, demography, political economy, and Catholic social thought. Mrs. Pakaluk is author of the widely acclaimed ethnography “Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth” (Regnery, 2024), a multidisciplinary account of American women choosing to have large families against the global trend to sub-replacement fertility. Her work has been reviewed or covered in The New Yorker, Slate, The Atlantic, The Times (of London), The Wall Street Journal, Freakonomics Radio, NPR, Fox News, and more. Pakaluk received the Acton Institute’s Novak Award in 2015 and a Freedom and Opportunity Academic Prize from The Heritage Foundation in 2023. After completing her doctoral work at Harvard University under 2016 Nobel-laureate Oliver Hart, Pakaluk has co-authored highly cited articles in social science and epidemiological journals, including Demography, Economic Inquiry, and the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. She is married to American philosopher Michael Pakaluk with whom she has eight beautiful children.