An Interview with John M. Abowd

Abstract

John M. Abowd is the Chief Scientist and Associate Director for Research and Methodology, US Census Bureau. He completed his AB in Economics at Notre Dame in 1973 and his PhD in Economics at University of Chicago in 1977 under Arnold Zellner. During his academic career, John has held faculty positions at Princeton, the University of Chicago, and, since 1987 at Cornell University where he is the Edmund Ezra Day Professor Emeritus of Economics, Statistics and Data Science. John was trained as a statistician and labor economist, and his economic research has focused on the rigorous empirical evaluation of labor market institutions. In the late 1990s, he began working with the Census Bureau on projects that would end up leveraging administrative and survey records into official statistical products. Through that work, he has developed a research agenda focused on issues necessary to generate those products, including data privacy, synthetic data, total error analysis, data linkage, and missing data problems, among others.