Brief Bio for Claudia Goldin

 

 

          Claudia Goldin is the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University and director of the NBER’s Development of the American Economy program.  Before coming to Harvard she was on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and the University of Wisconsin.  Goldin recently served as the President of the Economic History Association and was Vice President of that association in 1989.  In 1991 Goldin was a Vice President of the American Economic Association.  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 the editorial boards of the Journal of Interdisciplinary History and the Review of Economics and Statistics.  She holds an honorary doctor of humane letters from the University of Nebraska and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Econometric Society.  Her research has been funded by the NSF and the Spencer Foundation and she was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1987/88.  She has won several awards for her teaching of undergraduate and graduate students.  Goldin received her B.A. from Cornell University and her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

 

          Goldin’s research is in the general area of American economic history and has covered a wide range of topics, such as slavery, emancipation, the post-bellum South, the family, women in the economy, the economic impact of war, immigration, New Deal policies, inequality, technological change, and education.  Most of her research interprets the “present through the lens of the past” and explores the origins of current issues of concern, such as the reasons for immigration restriction, the causes of increased female labor force participation, the impact of technological change on the wage structure, and the role of education in ameliorating inequality.  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), and 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).  Her most recent papers are on the rise of mass education in the United States and its impact on inequality and they will form the core of her book in progress, The Race between Education and Technology.  She has also continued her work on gender issues and her most recent work in that area concerns the impact of “the pill” on women’s career and marriage decisions in the 1970s.

 

Claudia Goldin’s Harvard webpage: http://post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/goldin/goldin.html