I briefly review the emergence of “ design-based” research methods in labor economics in the 1980s and early 1990s. These methods were seen as a partial solution to the problems of credible inference identified by Ashenfelter (1974), Leamer (1978), Hendry (1980), and others. Designed-based studies typically use a simplified one-equation model of the outcome of interest—in contrast to model-based studies that specify a data generating process for all factors determining the outcome. I discuss some of the strengths and weaknesses of the design-based approach and the value of such research in the field.

I discuss the recent literature that has led to new interest in the idea of monopsonistic wage setting. Building on advances in search theory and in models of differentiated products, researchers have used a number of different strategies to identify the elasticity of firm-specific labor supply. A growing consensus is that firms have some wage-setting power, though many questions remain about the sources of that power.

Alan Krueger was one of the most prolific and influential economists of his generation. While his research extended into many different areas, including environmental economics,macroeconomics, and behavioral economics, he identifiedfirst and foremost as a “labor economist.”Hewas a labor economist par excellence, always pushing the field in a new (or long overlooked) direction while maintaining the highest standards for the quality and credibility of his empirical findings. The papers in this issue, written by his students and colleagues in labor economics, pay tribute to some of his major contributions to our field. Virtually every paper builds on one or more of Alan’s ideas. Alan earned his bachelor’s degree in industrial and labor relations from Cornell in 1983. His early education included classes in labor economics and statistics that informed his work throughout his career, including a deep appreciation of the value of original data. Thiswas reflected in the surveys at the heart of many of his best-known papers—including his studies of minimum wages (Katz and Krueger 1992; Card and Krueger 1994), twins (Ashenfelter and Krueger 1994), well-being (Kahneman et al. 2004), and wage posting (Hall and Krueger 2012)—and by his founding of the Survey Research Center at Princeton in 1993. Alan’s 1987 dissertation at Harvard focused on wage determination—a topic he returned to often. The first chapter, which was his job market paper and was later published in theQuarterly Journal of Economics (Krueger 1991), is remarkable for the bold simplicity of its design. Alan proposed to

School quality affects upward mobility in educational attainment. This conclusion comes from an analysis of families with coresident teenage children in the 1940 census. We study parents in the bottom quartile of the education distribution and define “upward mobility” as a generational move up the educational ladder to the top three quartiles of the child’s cohort. At the state level, upward mobility is strongly tied to teacher wages. This relationship holds when we narrow our focus to families on adjacent sides of state borders in the South, where state minimum salary laws created sharp teacher-wage differences between otherwise similar counties.

We study the selection of Fellows of the Econometric Society, using a new data set of publications and citations for over 40,000 actively publishing economists since the early 1900s. Conditional on achievement, we document a large negative gap in the probability that women were selected as Fellows in the 1933–1979 period. This gap became positive (though not statistically significant) from 1980 to 2010, and in the past decade has become large and highly significant, with over a 100% increase in the probability of selection for female authors relative to males with similar publications and citations. The positive boost affects highly qualified female candidates (in the top 10% of authors) with no effect for the bottom 90%. Using nomination data for the past 30 years, we find a key proximate role for the Society's Nominating Committee in this shift. Since 2012, the Committee has had an explicit mandate to nominate highly qualified women, and its nominees enjoy above‐average election success (controlling for achievement). Looking beyond gender, we document similar shifts in the premium for geographic diversity: in the mid‐2000s, both the Fellows and the Nominating Committee became significantly more likely to nominate and elect candidates from outside the United States. Finally, we examine gender gaps in several other major awards for U.S. economists. We show that the gaps in the probability of selection of new fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences closely parallel those of the Econometric Society, with historically negative penalties for women turning to positive premiums in recent years.