Jacob Mincer Award

Abstract

Previous articleNext article FreeJacob Mincer AwardPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreLawrence F. Katz is the 2022 recipient of the Jacob Mincer Award for lifetime contributions to the field of labor economics. Katz graduated from Berkeley in 1981 and earned his PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985. He returned to Berkeley as an assistant professor and joined the economics faculty of Harvard University after one year, where he is currently the Elisabeth Allison Professor of Economics. He is a Society of Labor Economists (SOLE) fellow (elected 2005), a past SOLE president (2013–14), a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, and a research fellow at the Institute of Labor Economics (IZA). Katz was chief economist of the US Department of Labor and has served on the advisory boards of several important institutions.Katz’s most influential research studies the evolution of wage inequality in advanced countries. He focuses on the fundamental role of technological change and education. His 1992 Quarterly Journal of Economics paper with Murphy developed the “canonical framework,” a simple model expressing the educational wage premium as reflecting observable shifts in educational supply and a residual technical change term. He found that although increases in the supply of skilled workers reduce inequality, technology often favors more skilled workers, increasing inequality. With Autor and Krueger, he found that increases in observable technology indicators, such as computer usage and R&D, increase skill demand, further bolstering the skill-biased technological change hypothesis. Researchers have adopted these methods to analyze changing inequality in many countries.His authoritative book with Claudia Goldin, The Race between Education and Technology (2008), examines how the growth of educational institutions contained inequality for most of the twentieth century. The slowdown in educational attainment for cohorts entering the labor market after roughly 1980 increased the return to schooling in the last quarter of the century.With Autor and Kearney (American Economic Review, 2006; Review of Economics and Statistics, 2008), Katz argues for a more nuanced role of technology. Digital technologies tend to replace routine tasks performed by occupations in the middle of the wage distribution, where wages and employment fell noticeably from the 1990s, compared with both the top and the bottom of the earnings distribution. European studies replicate this “hollowing out” of “middle jobs.” His recent work shows that the growth of large “superstar firms” with low labor shares and high profit margins explains the decline in labor’s share of gross domestic product (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2020). Again, he links this to changes in the fundamental nature of technologies.Other work demonstrates the importance of place. With Kling and Liebman (Econometrica, 2007; Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2001), he demonstrated that although changing neighborhoods did not raise adults’ earnings, it substantially improved their mental health. With Chetty and Hendren (American Economic Review, 2016), he found that better neighborhoods helped the future labor market outcomes of younger children.In sum, Lawrence Katz is an extraordinarily productive scholar who has changed the face of social science. His work is marked by an intense empirical seriousness and a strong focus on policy. His research seeks to change the world, not just to interpret it.Beyond his research contributions, Katz has provided distinguished service to the profession as editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics for the past 30 years. Under his leadership, it has become the most widely cited economics journal. His success in reducing review times at that publication has set the standard for other top journals in economics. He is renowned for his generous mentorship of junior scholars and his decency and respect in dealing with other economists. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Labor Economics Volume 40, Number 3July 2022 Published for the Society of Labor Economists, Economics Research Center/ NORC Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/721002 Views: 571Total views on this site © 2022 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.