Jacob Mincer Award

Previous articleNext article FreeJacob Mincer AwardPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreThe Society of Labor Economists (SOLE) awards the 2023 Jacob Mincer Award for lifetime contributions to labor economics to Joseph Altonji.Joe Altonji is the Thomas DeWitt Cuyler Professor of Economics at Yale University and has taught there since 2002. He previously held faculty positions at Columbia University and Northwestern University. Joe earned his undergraduate degree from Yale University in 1975 and his PhD in economics from Princeton University in 1981. He is a SOLE fellow (elected in 2006), a past president of SOLE (2018–19), the 2018 recipient of the IZA Prize in Labor Economics, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), and a fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.Altonji has been an influential and insightful leader in labor economics for four decades with pioneering research contributions spanning most core areas of the field, including labor supply, labor market cyclical fluctuations, economics of the family, wage determination, economics of education and estimation of returns to different educational investments, earnings dynamics, labor market discrimination, race and gender disparities in the labor market, and applied econometric methods. His work is notable in developing and implementing more rigorous empirical tests of economic theories to better understand the operation of labor markets, educational choices, and household decisions concerning labor supply and consumption. Along the way he has illuminated many policy-relevant issues and made fundamental and practical contributions to empirical methodology.Altonji’s early empirical research (Review of Economic Studies 1982) challenged a core tenet of real business cycle models that cyclical fluctuations in employment reflected optimizing labor supply responses to expected real wages. He then provided more convincing micro panel data evidence on individual-level intertemporal labor supply behavior (Journal of Political Economy 1986). His prominent series of papers (with Fumio Hayashi and Laurence Kotlikoff) assessed the extent to which the extended family represents the appropriate unit of economic decision-making, including a clever and compelling test of whether parents and their adult children act as a single unified economic unit by examining the extent to which the distribution of consumption of parents and children systematically depends on the distribution of their incomes (American Economic Review 1992). Altonji also has done important work improving the econometric modeling of earnings dynamics (Econometrica 2009 with Anthony Smith and Ivan Vidangos) and providing new approaches to distinguishing labor market returns to job seniority versus general labor market experience (e.g., Review of Economic Studies 1987 with Robert Shakotko).Altonji is well known for his seminal work on testing the key implications of employer public learning and statistical discrimination for the evolution of educational and racial wage gaps over the early careers of young workers (Quarterly Journal of Economics 2001 with Charles Pierret). He has made many important advances in trying to assess the role of specific course work in high school and the field of study in higher education (college major and graduate fields) in the labor market returns to education (e.g., Journal of Human Resources 1995; Journal of Labor Economics 2014 with Lisa Kahn and Jamin Speer; Journal of Labor Economics 2021 with Ling Zhong).Altonji’s work always exemplifies a thoughtful combination of appropriate and rigorous economic theory combined with the application of the most credible empirical approaches at (or even beyond) the prevailing econometric frontier while attempting to use the most appropriate available datasets. He has pushed out the econometric frontier with innovative contributions to empirical methodology, including his highly influential work on improving the assessment of the extent of selection on unobservables in the nonexperimental estimation of program treatment effects, by making better use of observable covariates, including a classic application to estimating the economic returns to attending a Catholic school (starting with the 2005 piece in the Journal of Political Economy with Todd Elder and Christopher Taber).Altonji’s contributions to labor economics reflect tremendous breadth and depth, illustrating the gains to knowledge from taking economic theory seriously while assessing its plausibility with rigorous empirical evidence. His work is a model for applied microeconomists. Furthermore, Joe Altonji has a long and stellar record as a superb advisor to undergraduates and PhD students and as an amazing and caring mentor to young scholars. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Journal of Labor Economics Volume 41, Number 4October 2023 Published for the Society of Labor Economists, Economics Research Center/ NORC Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/727517 © 2023 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.