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James Heckman

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James Joseph Heckman
Born (1944-04-19) April 19, 1944 (age 80)
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
NationalityUnited States
Academic career
FieldMicroeconomics
InstitutionUniversity of Southern California[1]
University of Chicago
University of Chicago Law School[2]
School or
tradition		Chicago School of Economics
Alma materPrinceton University
Colorado College
InfluencesAlbert Rees
Gary Becker
Jacob Mincer
ContributionsStatistical analysis of individual behavior
Heckman correction
AwardsJohn Bates Clark Medal (1983)
Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics (2000)
Frisch Medal (2014)
Information at IDEAS / RePEc
Websiteheckmanequation.org

James Joseph Heckman (born April 19, 1944) is an American economist and Nobel laureate. He is the Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor of Economics and the Law School,[2] and director at the Center for the Economics of Human Development at the University of Chicago, and a senior research fellow at the American Bar Foundation.

Heckman shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2000 with Daniel McFadden for his pioneering work in econometrics and microeconomics. He is considered to be among the most influential economists in the world.[6]

Early years

Heckman was born to John Jacob Heckman and Bernice Irene Medley in Chicago, Illinois.[7] He received his B.A. in mathematics from Colorado College and received his Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University in 1971, under supervision of Albert Rees.[8]

Career

He served as an assistant professor at Columbia University before moving to the University of Chicago in 1973.

In addition to serving as the Henry B. Schultz Distinguished Service Professor of Economics, Heckman is also the director of the Economics Research Center and the Center for Social Program Evaluation at the Irving B. Harris School of Public Policy. In 2004, he was appointed as the Distinguished Chair of Microeconometrics at University College London. In June 2006, he was appointed as the Professor of Science and Society at University College Dublin.[9] He is also a senior research fellow at the American Bar Foundation.

Research

Heckman is noted for his contributions to selection bias and self-selection analysis, especially Heckman correction, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics. He is also well known for his empirical research in labor economics, particularly regarding the efficacy of early childhood education programs.

His work has been devoted to the development of a scientific basis for economic policy evaluation, with special emphasis on models of individuals and disaggregated groups, and the problems and possibilities created by heterogeneity, diversity, and unobserved counterfactual states. He developed a body of new econometric tools that address these issues. His research has given policymakers important new insights into areas such as education, job-training, the importance of accounting for general equilibrium in the analysis of labor markets, anti-discrimination law, and civil rights. He demonstrated a strong causal effect of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in promoting African-American economic progress. He has recently demonstrated that the high school dropout rate is increasing in the US. He has studied the economic benefits of sorting in the labor market, the ineffectiveness of active labor market programs, and the economic returns to education. His recent research focuses on inequality, human development and lifecycle skill formation, with a special emphasis on the economics of early childhood education. He is currently conducting new social experiments on early childhood interventions and reanalyzing old experiments. He is also studying the emergence of the underclass in the US. and Western Europe.

In the early 1990s, his pioneering research on the outcomes of people who obtain the GED certificate received national attention.

Heckman has published over 300 articles and several books. His books include Inequality in America: What Role for Human Capital Policy? (with Alan Krueger); Evaluating Human Capital Policy, Law, and Employment: Lessons from Latin America and the Caribbean (with Carmen Pages); the Handbook of Econometrics, volumes 5, 6A, and 6B (edited with Edward Leamer); Global Perspectives on the Rule of Law, (edited with R. Nelson and L. Cabatingan); and The Myth of Achievement Tests: The GED and the Role of Character in American Life (with John Eric Humphries and Tim Kautz).

He is currently co-editor of the Journal of Labor Economics and the Journal of Applied Econometrics. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences USA and the American Philosophical Society. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society (of which he is also former president-elect), the Society of Labor Economics, the American Statistical Association, and the International Statistical Institute.

Awards

Heckman has received numerous awards for his work, including the John Bates Clark Medal of the American Economic Association in 1983; the 2005 and 2007 Dennis Aigner Award for Applied Econometrics from the Journal of Econometrics; the 2005 Jacob Mincer Award for Lifetime Achievement in Labor Economics; the 2005 Ulysses Medal from the University College Dublin; the 2007 Theodore W. Schultz Award from the American Agricultural Economics Association; the Gold Medal of the President of the Italian Republic, awarded by the International Scientific Committee of the Pio Manzú Centre in 2008; the Distinguished Contributions to Public Policy for Children Award from the Society for Research in Child Development in 2009; the 2014 Frisch Medal from the Econometric Society; and the Spirit of Erikson Award for 2014.

Personal life

Heckman is married to sociologist Lynne Pettler-Heckman, with whom he has two children: son Jonathan (b. 1982), a physicist at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and daughter Alma (b. 1986), an assistant professor of history at the University of California at Santa Cruz.[7][10]

See also

References

  1. ^ "Nobel laureate James Heckman joins USC Schaeffer Center".
  2. ^ a b "Prof. Heckman's profile at the UC Law School".
  3. ^ Hanford, Emily; Smith, Stephen; Stern, Laurie (September 1, 2013). "Second-Chance Diploma: Examining the GED". American Radio Works. publicradio.org. Retrieved March 3, 2015.
  4. ^ Heinrich, Carolyn (1995). Public policy and methodological issues in the design and evaluation of employment and training programs at the service delivery area level (Ph.D. Thesis). Chicago: University of Chicago. OCLC 34522177.
  5. ^ "James J Heckman profile on academictree.org". academictree.org. academictree.org. Retrieved December 4, 2015.
  6. ^ Author. "RePEc". Ideas/Repec. Retrieved January 15, 2013. {{cite web}}: |author= has generic name (help)
  7. ^ a b "James J. Heckman". The Notable Names Database. 2008. Retrieved November 18, 2008.
  8. ^ Overtveldt, Johan Van (2007). The Chicago School: How the University of Chicago Assembled the Thinkers Who Revolutionised Economics and Business. Chicago: Agate. p. 132. ISBN 978-1-932841-14-5.
  9. ^ University College Dublin web site.
  10. ^ "Alma Heckman's website at UC Santa Cruz".
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