Claudia Goldin

Claudia Goldin
Born	(1946-05-14) May 14, 1946 (age 75) New York City, New York, United States
Nationality	American
Institution	Harvard University NBER
Field	Labor economics Economic History
Alma mater	Cornell University (B.A.) University of Chicago (M.A., Ph.D.)
Doctoral advisor	Robert Fogel
Doctoral students	Cecilia Rouse Leah Boustan
Awards	IZA Prize in Labor Economics (2016) Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics (2020)
Information at IDEAS / RePEc
Website	https://scholar.harvard.edu/goldin

Claudia Goldin (born May 14, 1946) is an American economic historian and labor economist who is currently the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University. She is a co-director of the NBER's 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 recently-completed book Career & Family: Women's Century-Long Journey toward Equity (Princeton University Press) will be released October 2021.

Goldin was the president of the American Economic Association in the 2013–14 academic year. In 1990, Goldin became the first tenured woman at Harvard's economics department.^[1]

Early Life and Education[]

Goldin was born in New York City in 1946 to a Jewish family and grew up in the Parkchester housing complex in the Bronx. As a child, she was determined to become an archeologist, 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.

But all that changed when, in her sophomore year, she 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."^[2] 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. She wrote her PhD dissertation on slavery in US antebellum cities and in southern industry.^[3] She received a PhD in 1972.^[4] After graduate school, Goldin taught at the University of Wisconsin - Madison, Princeton University, and the University of Pennsylvania before joining the economics department at Harvard University in 1990, where she was the first woman to be offered tenure in that department.^[5]

Career[]

Goldin is best known for her historical work on women in the U.S. 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 “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.

Goldin was the president of the American Economic Association in 2013 and was president of the Economic History Association in 1999/2000. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society and a fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Society of Labor Economists (SOLE), the Econometric Society, and the Cliometric Society. She received the IZA Prize in Labor Economics in 2016 and in 2009 SOLE awarded Goldin the Mincer Prize for life-time contributions to the field of labor economics. She received the 2019 BBVA Frontiers in Knowledge award and the 2020 Nemmers award, both in economics. From 1984 to 1988 she was editor of the Journal of Economic History and is currently an associate editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics and a member of various editorial boards.  She is the recipient of several teaching awards.

She is the author and editor of several books, among them Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women (Oxford 1990), The Regulated Economy: A Historical Approach to Political Economy (with G. Libecap; University of Chicago Press 1994), The Defining Moment: The Great Depression and the American Economy in the Twentieth Century (with M. Bordo and E. White; University of Chicago Press 1998), Corruption and Reform: Lesson’s from America’s Economic History (with E. Glaeser; Chicago 2006), and Women Working Longer: Increased Employment at Older Ages (with L. Katz; Chicago 2018). Her book The Race between Education and Technology (with L. Katz; Belknap Press, 2008, 2010) was the winner of the 2008 R.R. Hawkins Award for the most outstanding scholarly work in all disciplines of the arts and sciences.

Personal life[]

Goldin is an avid birder and dog lover who has had three golden retrievers. She is married to fellow Harvard economist Lawrence Katz, and their current dog, Pika, has been widely recognized for his scenting work.^[6]

Awards[]

• 2005 Carolyn Shaw Bell Award from the American Economic Association.^[7]
• 2008 R.R . Hawkins Award, The Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers.
• 2009 The Richard A. Lester Award for the Outstanding Book in Industrial Relations and Labor Economics.
• 2009 The John R. Commons Award from Omicron Delta Epsilon, the economics honor society.^[8]
• 2016 IZA Prize in Labor Economics "for her career-long work on the economic history of women in education and the labor market."^[9]
• 2019 BBVA Foundation Frontiers in Knowledge Award in the category of Economics, Finance, and Management for her contributions to gender gap analysis.^[10]
• 2020 Erwin Plein Nemmers Prize in Economics.^[11]

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.

References[]

External links[]

• 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