Claudia Goldin

Claudia Dale Goldin (born May 14, 1946) is an American economic historian and labor economist. She is the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University. In October 2023, she was awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel,^[2] "for having advanced our understanding of women's labor market outcomes,”^[3] as well as the root causes of the gender pay gap. She was the third woman to win the award, and the first woman to win the award solo.^[4]

Claudia Goldin
Goldin in 2019
Born	Claudia Dale Goldin (1946-05-14) May 14, 1946 (age 77) New York City, U.S.
Education	Cornell University (BA) University of Chicago (MA, PhD)
Academic career
Institution	Harvard University National Bureau of Economic Research University of Pennsylvania
Field	Labor economics Economic history
Doctoral advisor	Robert Fogel^[1]
Doctoral students	Cecilia Rouse Leah Boustan
Awards	IZA Prize in Labor Economics (2016) Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics (2020) Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (2023)
Information at IDEAS / RePEc
Website	Official website

She is a co-director of the National Bureau of Economic Research's (NBER) Gender in the Economy Study Group and was the director of the NBER's Development of the American Economy program from 1989 to 2017. Goldin's research covers a wide range of topics, including the female labor force, the gender gap in earnings, income inequality, technological change, education, and immigration. Most of her research interprets the present through the lens of the past and explores the origins of current issues of concern. Her most recent book, Career & Family: Women's Century-Long Journey toward Equity (Princeton University Press), was released on October 5, 2021. Her contribution to studying women's work and labor market outcomes is evidenced in its impact on the fields of economics and economic history, including the study of women's role in economic development.^[5]

Goldin was the president of the American Economic Association in the 2013–14 academic year. In 1990, she became the first woman to be given a tenured professorship in Harvard's economics department.^[6]

Biography

Early life and education

Claudia Goldin was born into a Jewish family^[7] in New York City in 1946, and grew up in Parkchester in the Bronx.^[8] Her father Leon Goldin (1918—2011) worked as a data processing manager at Burlington Industries,^[8] and her mother Lucille Rosansky Goldin (1919—2020) was the principal of Public School 105 in the Bronx.^[9][10] As a child, Claudia was determined to become an archaeologist, but upon reading Paul de Kruif's The Microbe Hunters (1927) in junior high school, she became drawn to bacteriology. As a high school junior, she completed a summer school course in microbiology at Cornell University and after graduating from the Bronx High School of Science she entered Cornell University with the intention of studying microbiology.^[11][12][13]

In her sophomore year, Goldin took a class with Alfred Kahn, "whose utter delight in using economics to uncover hidden truths did for economics what Paul de Kruif's stories had done for microbiology."^[12] She became fascinated by regulation and industrial organization, the topics that interested Kahn, and she wrote her senior thesis on the regulation of communications satellites. After earning her B.A. in economics from Cornell, Goldin entered the PhD program in economics at the University of Chicago with the intention of studying industrial organization. She began her doctoral program in that field, but after Gary Becker came to Chicago she added labor economics and then gravitated to economic history with Robert W. Fogel as her advisor. She wrote her PhD dissertation on slavery in United States antebellum cities and in southern industry.^[14] She received a PhD in industrial organization and labor economics from the University of Chicago in 1972.^[13]

Career

After graduate school, Goldin was an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She moved to Princeton University in 1973 and to the University of Pennsylvania in 1979, where she became a tenured full professor. She joined the economics department at Harvard University in 1990, where she was the first woman to be offered tenure in that department.^[6]

Goldin was the president of the American Economic Association in 2013/14 and the president of the Economic History Association in 1999/2000. She has been elected fellow of numerous organizations, including the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the Society of Labor Economists, the Econometric Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.^[15] She is a member of sections 53 (Social and Political Sciences) and 54 (Economic Sciences) of the National Academy of Sciences.^[16] She has received several honorary doctorates including the University of Nebraska system,^[17][18] Lund University,^[19] the European University Institute,^[20] the University of Zurich,^[21] Dartmouth College,^[22] and the University of Rochester.^[23] She was an editor of the Journal of Economic History, from 1984 to 1988.^[15]

For 28 years ending in 2017, Goldin was the director of the Development of the American Economy (DAE) Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).^[13]

In 2015, with funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Goldin initiated the Undergraduate Women in Economics (UWE) Challenge in order to understand why the fraction of females among undergraduate majors in economics was so low. She carried out a randomized controlled trial using twenty institutions as treatment and others as controls to see if low-cost interventions could increase the number of female economics majors.^[24][25]

Research

Goldin is best known for her historical work on women and the economy. Her most influential papers in that area have concerned the history of women's quest for career and family, coeducation in higher education, the impact of the contraceptive pill on women's career and marriage decisions, women's surnames after marriage as a social indicator, the reasons why women are now the majority of undergraduates, and the new lifecycle of women's employment.^[26]

Goldin began her career researching the history of the US southern economy. Her first book, Urban Slavery in the American South, had been her PhD dissertation at the University of Chicago. Together with the late Frank Lewis, she wrote the widely cited paper "The Economic Cost of the American Civil War" (1978).^[27][28] She later worked with the Kenneth Sokoloff on early industrialization in the US and the role of female workers, child labor, and immigrant and working-class families. At that point, she realized that female workers had been largely overlooked in economic history and she set out to study how the female labor force evolved and its role in economic growth. Her major papers from that research effort include "Monitoring Costs and Occupational Segregation by Sex" (1987), "Life Cycle Labor Force Participation of Married Women" (1989), and "The Role of World War II in the Rise of Women's Employment" (1991). Her book Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women (1990) told the story of the rise of women's employment in the US from the eighteenth century to the late twentieth century, its role in economic growth, and why gender gaps have existed in earnings and employment and continue to exist.^[29]

After writing her book on the economic history of the female labor force, Goldin set out to research the history of US education. She began with a series of articles on the high school movement and the shaping of higher education in the US that culminated in her Economic History Association presidential address, "The Human Capital Century and American Leadership: Virtues of the Past" (2001).^[30][31][32]

She then worked with Lawrence Katz to understand the history of economic inequality in America and its relationship to educational advances. Their research produced many papers on the subject and was capped by the publication of The Race between Education and Technology (2008), which argues that the United States became the world's richest nation thanks to its schools.^[33][13] This book was praised as "a monumental achievement that supplies a unified framework for interpreting how the demand and supply of human capital have shaped the distribution of earnings in the U.S. labor market over the twentieth century",^[34] and Alan Krueger of Princeton University said that it "represent[ed] the best of what economics has to offer".^[35]

She and Katz also worked together in determining the value of a college education in the labor market through their 2016 paper "The Value of Postsecondary Credentials in the Labor Market: An Experimental Study".^[36]

Goldin continued to work on various topics of current concern, and many became part of volumes she jointly edited. These include the role of the press in reducing corruption, the benefice of providing clean water and effective sewage systems to reduce infant mortality (in "Watersheds in Child Mortality: The Role of Effective Water and Sewerage Infrastructure, 1880 to 1920"),^[37] the origins of immigration restriction, or the creation of US unemployment insurance.^[38][39]

During those years, she also published a series of important papers on gender. "Orchestrating Impartiality: The Effect of 'Blind' Auditions on Female Musicians" (with Rouse, 2000) is among her most highly cited papers. "The Power of the Pill: Oral Contraceptives and Women's Career and Marriage Decisions" (with Katz, 2002) and "The U-Shaped Female labor Force Function in Economic Development and Economic History," (1995) are some of her pioneering papers. She then began to focus on college women's quest for career and family and the reasons for the persistent gender gap in earnings.^[40][41][42] Her American Economic Association presidential address, "A Grand Gender Convergence: Its Last Chapter" set forth what the last chapter must contain for there to be equality between men and women in the labor market.^[43] Her book Career & Family: Women's Century-Long Journey toward Equity contains the full history and concludes with the impact of the pandemic on women's careers and couple equity.^[44]

Personal life

Goldin is married to fellow Harvard economics professor Lawrence Katz.^[45] She has had Golden Retrievers ever since 1970, starting with Kelso. Pika, her and her husband's current dog, has been widely recognized for his award in competitive scenting, was trained for obedience competitions, and has been a therapy dog at a local nursing home.^[46]

Awards

• 1990, 2008, 2021: Three times laureate of the Richard A. Lester Award for the Outstanding Book in Industrial Relations and Labor Economics^[47][48]
• 1991: Allan Sharlin Memorial Book Award from the Social Science History Association^[49]
• 2005: Carolyn Shaw Bell Award from the American Economic Association^[50]
• 2008: R.R. Hawkins Award, The Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers^[51]
• 2009: Jacob Mincer Award from the Society of Labor Economists^[13]
• 2009: The John R. Commons Award from Omicron Delta Epsilon, the economics honor society^[52]
• 2016: IZA Prize in Labor Economics "for her career-long work on the economic history of women in education and the labor market"^[53]
• 2019: BBVA Foundation Frontiers in Knowledge Award in the category of Economics, Finance, and Management for her contributions to gender gap analysis^[54]
• 2020: Clarivate Citation laureate in Economic Sciences^[55]
• 2020: Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics^[56]
• 2021: Society for Progress Medal^[57]
• 2022: Visionary Award from the Council for Economic Education^[58]
• 2023: Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel^[4]
• 2023: Included in BBC's 100 Women list^[59]

Selected works

• Goldin, Claudia Dale. Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990, ISBN 978-0-19-505077-6.
• Goldin, Claudia Dale et al. Strategic Factors in Nineteenth Century American Economic History: A Volume to Honor Robert W. Fogel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, ISBN 978-0-226-30112-9.
• Goldin, Claudia Dale and Gary D. Libecap. Regulated Economy: A Historical Approach to Political Economy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, ISBN 978-0-226-30110-5.
• Bordo, Michael D., Claudia Dale Goldin, and Eugene Nelson White. The Defining Moment: The Great Depression and the American Economy in the Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, ISBN 978-0-226-06589-2.
• Glaeser, Edward L. and Claudia Dale Goldin. Corruption and Reform: Lessons from America's History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006, ISBN 978-0-226-29957-0.
• Goldin, Claudia Dale and Lawrence F. Katz. The Race Between Education and Technology. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0-674-02867-8.
• Goldin, Claudia and Alsan, M. "Watersheds in Child Mortality: The Role of Effective Water and Sewerage Infrastructure, 1880 to 1920", Journal of Political Economy 127(2, 2018), pp. 586–638
• Goldin, Claudia and Lawrence F. Katz. Women Working Longer: Increased Employment at Older Ages. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. ISBN 978-0-226-53250-9
• Goldin, Claudia. Career & Family: Women's Century-Long Journey toward Equity. Princeton, NJ. Princeton University Press, 2021. ISBN 978-0-691-20178-8
• "A Grand Gender Convergence: Its Last Chapter," American Economic Review 104 (April 2014), pp. 1091–119.

References

1. Lee, Tori (October 9, 2023). "UChicago alum Claudia Goldin wins Nobel Prize for research on gender and labor". University of Chicago. Retrieved October 9, 2023.
2. "Nobel Prizes". The University of Edinburgh. October 11, 2023.
3. "The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2023". October 9, 2023.
4. Johnson, Simon; Ahlander, Johan (October 9, 2023). "Nobel economics prize goes to Claudia Goldin". Reuters – via reuters.com.
5. Merouani, Youssouf; Perrin, Faustine (September 28, 2022). "Gender and the long-run development process. A survey of the literature". European Review of Economic History. 26 (4): 612–641. doi:10.1093/ereh/heac008. ISSN 1361-4916.
6. Alexander, Sophie M. (April 26, 2007). "Goldin Demystifies Gender Economics". The Harvard Crimson.
7. "Sheryl Sandberg interview on Harvard professor Claudia Goldin winning Nobel Prize". The Independent. October 11, 2023.
8. Camera, Daily (June 24, 2011). "Leon Goldin".
9. "Lucille Goldin Obituary (2020) – Boulder, CO – The Daily Camera". Legacy.com.
10. "Lucille Goldin Obituary – Boulder, CO". Dignity Memorial.
11. "Claudia Goldin". www.richmondfed.org. Retrieved October 9, 2023.
12. "Economist as Detective". from the original on September 21, 2015.
13. Walker, Peter J. (December 2018). "Profile of Harvard Economist Claudia Goldin". IMF Finance & Development Magazine. IMF.
14. Goldin, Claudia. . Rare Americana. Archived from the original on August 20, 2021. Retrieved August 20, 2021.
15. "Claudia Goldin, Distinguished Fellow 2014". aeaweb.org. American Economic Association. Retrieved October 10, 2023.
16. "Claudia D. Goldin". nasonline.org. National Academy of Sciences. Retrieved October 10, 2023.
17. "Honorary Degrees" (PDF). University of Nebraska system. Retrieved October 10, 2023.
18. Clement, Douglas. "Interview with Claudia Goldin | Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis". minneapolisfed.org. Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. Retrieved October 10, 2023.
19. "LUSEM honorary doctor receives the Prize in Economic Sciences 2023". Lund University School of Economics and Management. Retrieved October 10, 2023.
20. "Doctor Honoris Causa of the EUI". European University Institute. Retrieved October 10, 2023.
21. "Prof. Dr. Claudia Goldin". uzh.ch (in German). University of Zurich. Retrieved October 10, 2023.
22. "Claudia Goldin, Doctor of Humane Letters | Dartmouth". home.dartmouth.edu. Dartmouth College. June 22, 2022. Retrieved October 10, 2023.
23. "Honorary degrees". rochester.edu. University of Rochester. Retrieved October 10, 2023.
24. "Undergraduate Women in Economics (UWE)". scholar.harvard.edu. Retrieved October 10, 2023.
25. Avilova, Tatyana; Goldin, Claudia (August 21, 2023). "What the Undergraduate Women in Economics Challenge did for economics". CEPR. Retrieved October 10, 2023.
26. "Bio for Claudia Goldin". scholar.harvard.edu. Retrieved October 11, 2023.
27. Goldin, Claudia D.; Lewis, Frank D. (1975). "The Economic Cost of the American Civil War: Estimates and Implications". The Journal of Economic History. 35 (2): 299–326. doi:10.1017/S0022050700075070. S2CID 18760067.
28. Coclanis, Peter A. (October 15, 1996). "The American Civil War in Economic Perspective: Basic Questions and Some Answers" (PDF). Southern Cultures. 2 (2): 163–175. doi:10.1353/scu.1996.0000. JSTOR 26235409. S2CID 143721298.
29. "Claudia Goldin | Biography, Nobel Prize, & Facts | Britannica". www.britannica.com. October 11, 2023. Retrieved October 11, 2023.
30. Goldin, Claudia; Katz, Lawrence F. (1999). "Human Capital and Social Capital: The Rise of Secondary Schooling in America, 1910–1940". The Journal of Interdisciplinary History. 29 (4): 683–723. doi:10.1162/002219599551868. ISSN 0022-1953. JSTOR 206979. S2CID 144861011.
31. "High School Movement | Lawrence Katz". scholar.harvard.edu. Retrieved October 13, 2023.
32. Goldin, Claudia (2001). "The Human-Capital Century and American Leadership: Virtues of the Past". The Journal of Economic History. 61 (2): 263–292. doi:10.1017/S0022050701028017. ISSN 0022-0507. JSTOR 2698021. S2CID 260620124.
33. Kotkin, Stephen (October 5, 2008). "Minding the Inequality Gap". New York Times.
34. Daron Acemoğlu; David Autor (June 2012). "What Does Human Capital Do? A Review of Goldin and Katz's The Race between Education and Technology". Journal of Economic Literature. 50 (2): 426–463. doi:10.1257/jel.50.2.426. hdl:1721.1/73913. S2CID 1160680.
35. Goldin, Claudia Dale; Katz, Lawrence F. (2009). The Race between Education and Technology. Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0674035300.
36. Deming, David J.; Yuchtman, Noam; Abulafi, Amira; Goldin, Claudia; Katz, Lawrence F. (March 2016). "The Value of Postsecondary Credentials in the Labor Market: An Experimental Study". American Economic Review. 106 (3): 778–806. doi:10.1257/aer.20141757. ISSN 0002-8282. S2CID 31434378.
37. Walker, Peter J. (December 2018). "Time Traveler" (PDF). Harvard.edu.
38. Goldin, Claudia (1993). The Regulated Economy: A Historical Approach to Political Economy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
39. Baicker, Katherine; Goldin, Claudia; Katz, Lawrence; Bordo, Michael; Goldin, Claudia; White, Eugene (1998). The Defining Moment: The Great Depression and the American Economy in the Twentieth Century. University of Chicago Press.
40. Tolbert, Pamela S. (March 2023). "Claudia Goldin. Career and Family: Women's Century-Long Journey Toward Equity". Administrative Science Quarterly. 68 (1): NP9–NP11. doi:10.1177/00018392221105201. ISSN 0001-8392. S2CID 249814162.
41. Olivetti, Claudia; Petrongolo, Barbara (October 31, 2016). "The Evolution of Gender Gaps in Industrialized Countries". Annual Review of Economics. 8 (1): 405–434. doi:10.1146/annurev-economics-080614-115329. ISSN 1941-1383. S2CID 1740869.
42. Jayachandran, Seema (August 1, 2015). "The Roots of Gender Inequality in Developing Countries". Annual Review of Economics. 7 (1): 63–88. doi:10.1146/annurev-economics-080614-115404. ISSN 1941-1383. S2CID 3668332.
43. Goldin, Claudia (2014). "A Grand Gender Convergence: Its Last Chapter". American Economic Review. 104 (4): 1091–1119. doi:10.1257/aer.104.4.1091. ISSN 0002-8282. S2CID 155044380.
44. "Career & Family". Harvard University. Retrieved October 12, 2023.
45. Kampeas, Ron (October 9, 2023). "Economics Nobel awarded to Claudia Goldin for work on women in the labor market".
46. "Pika the Golden Retriever". scholar.harvard.edu. Retrieved August 4, 2021.
47. "The Richard A. Lester Book Award". The Richard A. Lester Book Award. Princeton University Industrial Relations Section.
48. "The Richard A. Lester Book Award". Industrial Relations Section. Retrieved October 10, 2023.
49. "Allan Sharlin Memorial Book Award".
50. "Claudia Goldin Named the Recipient of the 2005 Carolyn Shaw Bell Award".
51. Glaser, Linda B. (October 15, 2014). "Oct. 23 talk will show path to full gender equality | Cornell Chronicle". Cornell Chronicle.
52. "Omicron Delta Epsilon – The International Economics Honor Society". www.omicrondeltaepsilon.org. Retrieved May 13, 2020.
53. . IZA – Institute of Labor Economics. 2016. Archived from the original on September 8, 2018. Retrieved June 28, 2017.
54. "The BBVA Foundation recognizes Claudia Goldin for pioneering analysis of the gender gap". EurekAlert!. March 26, 2019. Retrieved March 31, 2019.
55. Plc, Clarivate. "Clarivate Reveals 2020 Citation Laureates – Annual List of Researchers of Nobel Class". www.prnewswire.com (Press release). Retrieved October 9, 2023.
56. "The Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics: Nemmers Prize – Northwestern University". www.nemmers.northwestern.edu.
57. "2021 Progress Medal laureates announcement" (PDF). Society for Progress. October 3, 2021.
58. "2022 Visionary Awards Benefit Dinner". Council for Economic Education. May 7, 2022.
59. "BBC 100 Women 2023: Who is on the list this year?". BBC News. November 23, 2023. Retrieved November 24, 2023.

External links

• Claudia Goldin on Nobelprize.org  
  • Scientific Background to the Nobel prize in Economics (PDF)
  • Scientific Background to the Nobel prize in Economics (popular version) (PDF)
• Claudia Goldin Curriculum vitae (PDF)
• The Economist as Detective, a brief autobiographical essay by Claudia Goldin. In: M. Szenberg (ed.). Passion and Craft: Economists at Work. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998, ISBN 978-0-472-09685-5.
• Academic Papers by Claudia Goldin.
• Interview with Goldin by The Region of the Minneapolis Fed
• Works by or about Claudia Goldin at Internet Archive
• Appearances on C-SPAN

Academic offices
Preceded by Christopher A. Sims	President of the American Economic Association 2013–2014	Succeeded by William Nordhaus