Knowledge that Transforms

Previous articleNext article FreeOfficers of the SocietyPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMore2021–23 Board of Officers of the SocietyPresident (2021–22): Kevin Lang, Boston UniversityPresident-Elect (2022–23): Thomas Lemieux, University of British ColumbiaVice President (2023–24): Kathryn Shaw, Stanford University2020–22: Claudia Olivetti, Dartmouth College2020–22: Lisa Kahn, Rochester University2021–23: Hilary Hoynes, University of California, Berkeley2021–23: Barbara Petrongolo, University of OxfordKevin Lang, Boston University and the Journal of Labor Economics, ex officioFellows of the Society of Labor EconomistsJohn AbowdKatharine AbrahamDaron AcemogluGeorge AkerlofJoseph AltonjiJoshua AngristOrley AshenfelterDavid AutorAnn BartelGary Becker*Marianne BertrandDan BlackSandra BlackRebecca BlankFrancine BlauRichard BlundellGeorge BorjasJohn BoundCharles BrownKenneth BurdettGlen Cain*David CardKerwin Kofi CharlesPierre-Andre ChiapporiJanet CurrieSteven J. DavisJohn DiNardo*Christian DustmannRon EhrenbergHenry FarberNicole FortinRichard FreemanVictor FuchsRoland G. FryerRobert GibbonsClaudia GoldinReuben GronauRobert HallJohn HaltiwangerDan HamermeshEric HanushekJames HeckmanV. Joseph HotzCaroline M. HoxbyHilary HoynesGeorge Johnson*Chinhui JuhnLawrence KahnLawrence KatzJohn KennanFrancis KramarzAlan Krueger*Robert J. LaLonde*Kevin LangRichard LayardEdward Lazear*Thomas LemieuxShelly LundbergStephen MachinW. Bentley MacLeodThomas MaCurdyAlan ManningAlexandre MasMarjorie McElroyCostas MeghirRobert MichaelJacob Mincer*Robert MoffittEnrico MorettiDale Mortensen*Richard MurnaneKevin MurphyDerek NealSteve NickellWalter Oi*John PencavelChristopher PissaridesRobert PollakCanice PrendergastMelvin Reder*Mark RosenzweigKathryn ShawRob ShimerJames SmithJeffrey SmithGary SolonFrank StaffordChris TaberPetra ToddRobert TopelJohn Van ReenenYoram WeissFinis WelchRobert WillisNew Fellows Elected in 2021Michael KeaneMagne MogstadPaul OyerCecila RouseKjell SalvanesNotes*Deceased. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Labor Economics Volume 39, Number 3July 2021 Published for the Society of Labor Economists, Economics Research Center/ NORC Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/715496 Views: 544Total views on this site © 2021 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Previous articleNext article FreeJacob Mincer AwardPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreKenneth Wolpin is the 2021 recipient of the Jacob Mincer Award for lifetime contributions to the field of labor economics. Ken is emeritus professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania, having recently retired from Rice, where was the Lay Family Professor of Economics and director of the Texas Policy Lab from 2016 to 2020. Previously, Ken spent 20 years at Penn, where he was the Annenberg Professor of Social Sciences. Ken was born in Manhattan in 1947, graduated from City College of New York in 1967, and worked as a high school teacher in Manhattan for three years before obtaining his PhD from City University of New York in 1974. On his committee were two former Mincer Award winners and a SOLE fellow, Finis Welch, Bob Willis, and Jim Smith. After a postdoc at Chicago, he spent several years at Yale, followed by professorships at Ohio State, Minnesota, and New York University.Ken Wolpin has made multiple contributions to labor economics, as a pioneer and leading exponent of dynamic structural modeling, as a pioneer in the use of natural experiments and application of theory to interpret them, and as a leader in the creation and improvement of key data sets. His 1984 Journal of Political Economy paper on fertility and child mortality was the first dynamic discrete-choice model of sequential decision-making under uncertainty ever estimated on panel data. His 1987 Econometrica paper on modeling school-to-work transitions of young men was another pioneering application of the dynamic discrete-choice approach. Wolpin’s 1989 Review of Economic Studies paper with Zvi Eckstein estimated the first structural model of women’s labor supply in which wages are endogenous because they are altered by work experience.Early work on dynamic structural models was limited by computational barriers. A 1994 Review of Economics and Statistics paper with Michael Keane used approximation and simulation methods to substantially enhance the richness of models that were feasible, in terms of both the number of decisions and the number of state variables. This work culminated in their 1997 Journal of Political Economy paper titled “The Career Decisions of Young Men,” which takes the human capital investment framework of Mincer and Becker seriously as a vehicle for explaining data on educational and occupational choices and labor supply. It has become a paradigm for subsequent structural work in labor. Substantively, it finds that the relevant skills that drive lifetime earnings are mostly attained prior to age 16, an idea that has been influential in shifting the focus of the human capital literature toward investments at younger ages. Eventually, a 2010 International Economic Review paper with Keane succeeded in extending the Mincer-Becker human capital investment framework further still by integrating marriage and fertility decisions into a model of the career decisions of young women.Ken achieved several other important “firsts” within the structural paradigm. His 1990 Econometrica paper with Eckstein was the first structural estimation of an equilibrium search model. His 1992 Journal of Political Economy paper was the first dynamic model where wages are driven by both work experience and job search. And his 2010 Econometrica paper with Donghoon Lee succeeded in placing the “career decisions” model in an equilibrium setting.Ken Wolpin’s leadership has also shaped the literature on natural experiments and data collection. Some of Ken’s most important work is at the intersection of labor and development economics. Ken’s 1980 Econometrica and Journal of Political Economy papers with Mark Rosenzweig used twins as a natural experiment to test the quantity-quality fertility model and to estimate the effects of fertility on female labor supply. And Ken’s 1982 International Economic Review paper used weather shocks as a source of exogenous variation to test the permanent income hypothesis. His 1982 Journal of Development Economics and 1986 American Economic Review papers with Rosenzweig exploited geographic variation of health and family planning interventions in India and the Philippines to show that these programs reduced fertility and child mortality, improved child health, and enhanced schooling of children. The latter paper was highly innovative in accounting for the endogenous location of interventions. Well ahead of its time, this work is some of the earliest in economics to leverage naturally occurring exogenous variation to test hypotheses and identify model parameters. In an important extension of this research program, a 2006 American Economic Review paper with Petra Todd used experimental data from Mexico’s Progresa program to validate a structural model of fertility and schooling.This is only a part of Ken’s enormous range of published work. He has an important stream of work on the estimation of production functions for child health and cognitive ability. This includes several papers with Rosenzweig and his widely cited 2003 and 2007 Economic Journal and Journal of Human Capital papers with Todd. There is also his work on fertility, intrahousehold transfers, labor market discrimination, the economics of education, and the economics of crime—the latter illustrated by his 2018 Review of Economic Studies paper with Chao Fu.Ken also made important contributions toward improving key data sets used by labor economists. As principal investigator of the National Longitudinal Surveys from 1983 to 1987 and director of the Center for Human Resource Research from 1985 to 1987, he made important contributions to the development of the National Longitudinal Surveys of Youth. He also served on the steering committee of the Health and Retirement Study from 2000 to 2004 and as an advisory board member for the Michigan Retirement Research Center (1999–2004), the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (1996–97), the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (1983–86, 1994–2000), the High School and Beyond Survey (1990–92), and the National Longitudinal Surveys (1988–1995).Ken Wolpin’s numerous contributions to labor economics, which encompass theory, methodological innovations, careful applied work, and leading data collection, make him a truly worthy recipient of the Jacob Mincer Award.2021 Selection Committee:Richard Blundell (chair)Martha BaileyNicole FortinMike KeaneLance LochnerKathleen McGarry Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Labor Economics Volume 39, Number 3July 2021 Published for the Society of Labor Economists, Economics Research Center/ NORC Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/715497 Views: 1006Total views on this site © 2021 by The University of Chicago. 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Previous articleNext article FreeSOLE Prize for Contributions to Data and MeasurementFull TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreJohn C. Haltiwanger is the 2021 recipient of the SOLE Prize for Contributions to Data and Measurement. John is Distinguished University Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland. He is a fellow of the Society of Labor Economists and a fellow of the Econometric Society as well as the recipient of the 2013 Julius Shiskin Award for Economic Statistics, the 2014 Roger Herriot Award for Innovation in Federal Statistics, and the 2020 Global Entrepreneurship Research Award.John has made path-breaking contributions to the development of new measures of economic activity. Even if aggregate employment is relatively stable, significant restructuring typically is occurring in the form of job creation at some firms simultaneously with job destruction at others. Working with administrative data housed at the US Census Bureau, John and his early collaborators pioneered the development of measures of job creation and job destruction that capture this sort of dynamic restructuring. These measures are now an important foundation for a large volume of research and policy analysis in this area.Building on this work, John has produced invaluable evidence concerning the contributions of small businesses versus new businesses to economic growth. In another stream of research, he has demonstrated the importance of the entry and growth of firms with above-average productivity and the decline and exit of firms with below-average productivity to aggregate productivity growth. An important pattern documented in John’s work is the decline in economic dynamism in recent decades, a finding with significant implications for economic opportunity and growth.More recently, John has turned his attention to the use of private sector “big data” to improve and supplement official economic statistics. Approaches to using these data such as those he and his collaborators are developing will be critical to capturing patterns of economic activity in the future, particularly as traditional methods face challenges and the structure of the US economy evolves.John’s contributions to the improvement of economic measurement go far beyond his own research. He was central to the development of the Census Bureau’s Longitudinal Business Database (LDB) and Business Dynamics Statistics (BDS) programs. He also made important contributions to the development of the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) program and, more recently, the new Business Formation Statistics (BFS). These data products have proven to be of enormous value to the research community. In addition, John has mentored and collaborated with dozens of students and younger scholars, many of whom have gone on to do their own important work related to the measurement of economic activity.Awarding John Haltiwanger the 2021 SOLE Prize for Contributions to Data and Measurement is a fitting recognition of his many contributions to improving the nation’s economic statistics.2021 SOLE Prize Nominating Committee:Katharine Abraham (chair)Nick BloomKaren DynanErika McEntarferRobert Moffitt (ex officio)John SabelhausDavid Weir Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Labor Economics Volume 39, Number 3July 2021 Published for the Society of Labor Economists, Economics Research Center/ NORC Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/715498 Views: 568 © 2021 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Previous articleNext article FreeSOLE 2022/27th Annual Meetings Call for PapersFull TextPDF Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe Society of Labor Economists will hold its 27th Annual Meetings on May 6–7, 2022, at the Radisson Blu in Minneapolis, Minnesota.More details about the meeting and submission process will be available at https://www.sole-jole.org. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Labor Economics Volume 39, Number 3July 2021 Published for the Society of Labor Economists, Economics Research Center/ NORC Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/715495 Views: 2237 © 2021 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

A growing literature uses random assignment of cases to judges to examine criminal sentencing. To extend this line of work, we directly examine how judicial “harshness” varies with the seriousness of criminal conviction. Using a model that respects the mix of cases and the noise produced by small caseloads, we find that case severity is best viewed as an endogenous outcome of bargaining. We also find that harsher judges have a higher share of cases failing to reach a plea bargain, but perhaps surprisingly, there is little evidence that large jumps in expected incarceration lead to differential plea bargain outcomes.

Central to the welfare analysis of income transfer programs is the deadweight loss associated with possible reforms. To aid analytical tractability, its measurement typically requires specifying a simplified model of behavior. We employ a complementary “decomposition” approach that compares the behavioral and mechanical components of a policy’s total impact on the government budget to study the deadweight loss of two unemployment insurance policies. Experimental and quasi-experimental estimates using state administrative data show that increasing the weekly benefit is more efficient (with a fiscal externality of 53 cents per dollar of mechanical transferred income) than reducing the program’s implicit earnings tax.

We explore workers’ valuation of job flexibility using a field experiment conducted on a Chinese job board. Our experimental job ads differ randomly in offering jobs that are flexible regarding when (time flexibility) or where (place flexibility) one works and in offering different salaries. Application rates are higher for flexible jobs conditional on the salary offered, providing evidence that workers value job flexibility. Moreover, under some plausible conditions our evidence is informative about job seekers’ willingness to pay for flexible jobs of the types offered in the experiment and points to fairly high valuation of the most flexible jobs.