Claudia Goldin | |
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.jpg) Goldin in 2019 | |
| Born | May 14, 1946 The Bronx, New York City, U.S. |
| Education | |
| Academic career | |
| Institution | |
| Field | |
| Doctoral advisor | Robert Fogel[5] |
| Doctoral students | |
| Awards | |
| Information at IDEAS / RePEc | |
| Website | Official website |
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.[10][1] In October 2023, she was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences "for having advanced our understanding of women's labor market outcomes”.[11] She was the third woman to win the award, and the first woman to win the award solo.[10][12]
She is a co-director (co-directing with Claudia Olivetti and Jessica Goldberg) of the National Bureau of Economic Research's (NBER) Gender in the Economy study group,[13] and was the director of the NBER's Development of the American Economy program from 1989 to 2017.[2]
Goldin's historical work on women and the American economy is what she is best known for. Regarding that subject, her papers that have been most influential have been those about the impact of the contraceptive pill on women's career and marriage decisions, the education of women and men together in higher education, the history of women's pursuit of career and family, women's last names after marriage as a social indicator, the reasons most undergraduates are now women, and the new life history of women's employment.[14]
In 1990, Goldin became the first woman to be tenured in Harvard's economics department.[15] In 2013 she was the president of the American Economic Association.[1]
Claudia Goldin was born in the Bronx, New York City on May 14, 1946.[10][16] Her family was Jewish.[17] Her father Leon Goldin (1918—2011) worked as a data processing manager at Burlington Industries,[16] and her mother Lucille Rosansky Goldin (1919—2020) was the principal of Public School 105 in the Bronx.[18][19] 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.[20][21][22]
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."[21] In 1967 she graduated from Cornell University with a BA in economics, and in 1969 she finished her Master's degree in Economics at the University of Chicago.[23] She received a PhD in industrial organization and labor economics from the University of Chicago in 1972.[22] She wrote her PhD dissertation on slavery in southern antebellum cities.[24][25]
From 1971-1973, she was an assistant professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin. She was also an assistant professor of economics from 1973-1979, at Princeton University. From 1979-1985 she was an associate professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania, and from 1985-1990 she was a professor of economics there.[23] She joined the economics department at Harvard University in 1990, where she was in 1990 the first woman to be given tenure in that department.[15]
Goldin was the president of the American Economic Association in 2013 and the president of the Economic History Association in 1999/2000.[1] 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.[26] She is a member of sections 53 (Social and Political Sciences) and 54 (Economic Sciences) of the National Academy of Sciences.[27] She has received several honorary doctorates including the University of Nebraska system,[28][29] Lund University,[30] the European University Institute,[31] the University of Zurich,[32] Dartmouth College,[33] and the University of Rochester.[34] She was an editor of the Journal of Economic History, from 1984 to 1988.[26]
In 2015, with funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Goldin and Tatyana Avilova initiated the Undergraduate Women in Economics (UWE) Challenge in hopes of shrinking the gender gap among undergraduate majors in economics. A randomized controlled trial was carried out for one year using twenty institutions to receive the treatment and sixty-eight others as controls to see if light-touch, low-cost interventions could increase the number of female economics majors. It was found that the treatment "may have been successful at liberal arts colleges and possibly at the larger universities that, in addition, had their own RCT [randomized controlled trial]."[35][36]
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).[22]
Goldin wrote regarding the American Civil War and slavery. Notably, together with the late Frank Lewis, she wrote the groundbreaking piece "The Economic Cost of the American Civil War: Estimates and Implications" (1975).[37][38] Also, in 1976 her book Urban Slavery in the American South, 1820 to 1860: A Quantitative History was published.[39]
However, Goldin's historical work on women and the American economy is what she is best known for. Regarding that subject, her papers that have been most influential have been those about the impact of the contraceptive pill on women's career and marriage decisions, the education of women and men together in higher education, the history of women's pursuit of career and family, women's last names after marriage as a social indicator, the reasons most undergraduates are now women, and the new life history of women's employment.[14] Her book Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women (1990) told the story of women's employment in the U.S. from the late eighteenth century to the late twentieth century.[39]
After writing that book on the economic history of the female labor force, Goldin set out to research the history of U.S. education. She began with a series of articles on the high school movement and the shaping of higher education in the U.S. that culminated in her Economic History Association presidential address, "The Human Capital Century and American Leadership: Virtues of the Past" (2001).[40][41][42]
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.[43][22] 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",[44] and Alan Krueger of Princeton University said that it "represent[ed] the best of what economics has to offer".[45]
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".[46]
Goldin continued to work on various other topics, including the role of the press in reducing corruption, the effect of providing clean water and effective sewage systems to reduce infant mortality (see the 2018 paper "Watersheds in Child Mortality: The Role of Effective Water and Sewerage Infrastructure, 1880 to 1920", which Goldin co-wrote with Marcella Alsan),[47] the origins of immigration restriction, and the creation of U.S. unemployment insurance.[48][49]
During those years, she also published a series of important papers on gender. "Orchestrating Impartiality: The Effect of 'Blind' Auditions on Female Musicians" (with Cecilia 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.[50][51][52] Her American Economic Association presidential address, "A Grand Gender Convergence: Its Last Chapter" set forth what the last chapter of employment must contain for there to be equality between men and women in the labor market.[53] Her book Career & Family: Women's Century-Long Journey toward Equity (2021) traces the history of college-educated women dealing with the problem of balancing career and family throughout the twentieth century in the United States,[54] including the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on women's careers.[55][56]
Goldin is married to fellow Harvard economics professor Lawrence Katz.[57] 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.[58]
