Claudia Goldin is an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 economist

Economist

An economist is a professional in the social science discipline of economics. The individual may also study, develop, and apply theories and concepts from economics and write about economic policy...

 and Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

.

Goldin is a director of the Development of the American Economy Program, and is a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research

National Bureau of Economic Research

The National Bureau of Economic Research is an American private nonprofit research organization "committed to undertaking and disseminating unbiased economic research among public policymakers, business professionals, and the academic community." The NBER is well known for providing start and end...

 (NBER), located in Cambridge

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Cambridge is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, in the Greater Boston area. It was named in honor of the University of Cambridge in England, an important center of the Puritan theology embraced by the town's founders. Cambridge is home to two of the world's most prominent...

, Massachusetts

Massachusetts

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. As of the 2010...

. She is a fellow in the Society of Labor Economists, American Academy of Arts and Sciences

American Academy of Arts and Sciences

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...

, and Econometric Society

Econometric Society

The Econometric Society is an international society for the advancement of economic theory in its relation with statistics and mathematics. It was founded on December 29, 1930 at the Stalton Hotel in Cleveland, Ohio....

.

Goldin serves on the editorial boards of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, The Review of Economics and Statistics and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, and is the editor of the NBER Long-term Trends in American Economic History Monograph Series. In 1990–1991 she was the Vice President of the American Economic Association

American Economic Association

The American Economic Association, or AEA, is a learned society in the field of economics, headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee. It publishes one of the most prestigious academic journals in economics: the American Economic Review...

, and in 1999–2000 she was President of the Economic History Association.

Education and work

Goldin was born in New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

 in 1946. She attended the Bronx High School of Science

Bronx High School of Science

The Bronx High School of Science is a specialized New York City public high school often considered the premier science magnet school in the United States. Founded in 1938, it is now located in the Bedford Park section of the Bronx...

 and Cornell University

Cornell University

Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...

 and completed her doctorate in economics at the University of Chicago

University of Chicago

The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...

 in 1972.

Her research interests include economic history, labor economics, gender and economics, and the economics of work, family, and education. Some of her more recent papers include "The Quiet Revolution that Transformed Women's Employment, Education, and Family", which describes and analyses changes in female labor force participation over the past century, "The Homecoming of American College Women: The Reversal of the Gender Gap in College" (with Lawrence Katz and Ilyana Kuziemko), which probes the causes of the upsurge in women’s college attendance, and "A Pollution Theory of Discrimination: Male and Female Occupations and Earnings", which addresses wage differentials between men and women.

Articles

The Quiet Revolution that Transformed Women's Employment, Education, and Family
The Quiet Revolution (1970s–present) was preceded by what Goldin labeled as three evolutionary phases: “Independent Female Worker” (late-19th century – 1920s), “Easing the Constraints on Married Women in the Labor Force” (1930s–1950), and “Roots of the Revolution” (1950s–1970s), respectively. In the first phase, the female workers were usually young and single, working in manufacturing or as domestics and laundresses. These women had little learning on the job and the majority of women were not well educated. Moving into the second phase, the labor factor productivity for married women increased by 15.5 percentage points because of an increased demand for office workers and the participation of women in the "high school movement". By the third phase, the female labor supply had become more elastic and more responsive to changes in wages. In this period, most women were secondary earners and worked in "pink-collar" jobs as secretaries, teachers, nurses, social workers, and librarians. Even though higher education was possible, most women did not establish careers and went to college to meet their spouses rather than to further their education. Goldin argues that the transformation in female labor force participation is due to changes in factors such as female horizons, identities, and average marrying age.

In Goldin's article, the term horizon refers to how a woman perceives her lifetime labor force involvement at the time of human capital investment, if her involvement will be long-term or short-term. Identity refers to the individuality a woman finds in her job, occupation, or career. Lastly, decision making entails whether a woman makes labor force decisions jointly if she is married or in a long-term relationship, or whether she takes a secondary position where time is allocated by her spouse's labor involvement decisions. What set the "Quiet Revolution" aside from the three evolutionary periods was that the revolution was a change marked from static decision-making to one of dynamic decision making

Dynamic decision making

Dynamic decision-making is interdependent decision-making that takes place in an environment that changes over time either due to the previous actions of the decision maker or due to events that are outside of the control of the decision maker...

.

According to Goldin, a key cause to the Quiet Revolution was the development of new contraceptive technology, namely the birth control pill. Young women married and had children at a lower rate if the state they lived in had early legal access to it; women could set aside their relationships and pursue a career through higher education. Goldin and Katz noted that the birth control pill was approved by the Food and Drug Administration

Food and Drug Administration

The Food and Drug Administration is an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services, one of the United States federal executive departments...

 in 1960 for use by married women. It spread to young non-married women in the late 1960s with change in age of majority laws. Thus, they found a difference from the national average for women born 1930–1965 with if they lived in a state with early legal access to the pill. There was a -0.02 difference in marriage age at 23 from the national average of 0.41. There was a –0.07 difference from the national average of having a child by 22. There was a 0.004 difference from the national average for being a professional, and a 0.016 difference from the national average of being a lawyer or doctor. The birth control pill affected marriage, fertility, and career choice.

Decreasing (and then Increasing Inequality) in America: A Tale of Two Half-Centuries

Goldin co-authored this article with Lawrence Katz, a fellow professor in the Economics Department at Harvard University. In the article, Goldin and Katz divide the 20th century in the United States into two periods. The second half of the 20th century is considered a period of widening inequality, while the first half, as Goldin and Katz demonstrate, is a period of narrowing inequality. They examine, among other things, the “Great Compression” of wages in the 1940s and education reforms such as the high school movement in the 1900s.

The Human Capital Century and American Leadership: Virtues of the Past

In the 20th century human capital investment became generally regarded by industrialized nations as being more important than technology and physical capital investment. This article queries the reasons the U.S. invested in human capital through post-elementary education to a far greater extent than other wealthy nations at the time.

"The Human Capital Century" examines the ways that post-elementary education in the U.S. during the 20th century was advanced, and argues that the principal reasons for U.S. education advancement were an ethic of egalitarianism (as opposed to elite educational systems in many European countries) and initial factor endowments which led to liberal education instead of vocational-geared education, a high level of return on post-elementary education, geographic mobility, and a decentralized educational system.

Virtues contributing to the American educational template included public funding, openness, local control, gender neutrality, separation of church and state, and an academic curriculum. The resulting “high school movement” incorporating these virtues produced a larger group of educated workers, enabled social and geographical mobility, and contributed to potential economic growth. In contrast, Europe’s educational template was determined by a centralized government and remained less open in the 1950s, focusing on providing technical training programs in the form of work-study arrangements for older teenagers.

Goldin states that many of the virtues characterizing the American educational system in the earlier part of the twentieth century may now be considered vices of the present. Through the open and forgiving system that once created social and geographic mobility, now appears a lack of strict standards. High enrollment rates for high schools as evidence for America’s open educational system do not necessarily imply high-quality education. Furthermore, through the decentralized system in which local districts that compete for residents participate in educational investments that once fostered growth of schools may now lead to large differences in funding. Finally, the public funding that once allowed anyone to join and everyone to be on equal footing now presents discrepancies due to poor and rich towns.

The Race Between Education and Technology

With Lawrence F. Katz

Lawrence F. Katz

Lawrence F. Katz is Elisabeth Allison Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Katz is the coauthor of The Race Between Education and Technology with Claudia Goldin, also a Harvard professor....

, she explores the United States' economic slowdown in the late 1970s. She reasons that it was rising levels of economic inequality at the end of the 20th century, not slow productivity growth nor economic convergence between nations, that was at the root of the United States' economic trouble.

Awards

• 2008 R.R. Hawkins Award, The Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers
  Association of American Publishers
  The Association of American Publishers is the national trade association of the American book publishing industry. AAP has more than 300 members, including most of the major commercial publishers in the United States, as well as smaller and non-profit publishers, university presses and scholarly...
  
  
• 2009 The Richard A. Lester Award for the Outstanding Book in Industrial Relations and Labor Economics

Selected works

• Goldin, Claudia Dale. Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990, ISBN 978-0-19-505077-6.
• Goldin, Claudia Dale and Lawrence F. Katz
  Lawrence F. Katz
  Lawrence F. Katz is Elisabeth Allison Professor of Economics at Harvard University. Katz is the coauthor of The Race Between Education and Technology with Claudia Goldin, also a Harvard professor....
  
  . The Race Between Education and Technology. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0-67-402867-8.
• Glaeser, Edward L. and Claudia Dale Goldin. Corruption and Reform: Lessons from America’s History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006, ISBN 978-0-22-629957-0.
• Bordo, Michael D., Claudia Dale Goldin, and Eugene Nelson White. The Defining Moment: The Great Depression and the American Economy in the Twentieth Century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, ISBN 978-0-22-606589-2.
• Goldin, Claudia Dale and Gary D. Libecap. Regulated Economy: A Historical Approach to Political Economy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994, ISBN 978-0-22-630110-5.
• Goldin, Claudia Dale et al. Strategic Factors in Nineteenth Century American Economic History: A Volume to Honor Robert W. Fogel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, ISBN 978-0-22-630112-9.

External links

• The Economist as Detective, a brief autobiographical essay by Claudia Goldin. In: M. Szenberg (ed.). Passion and Craft: Economists at Work. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998, ISBN 978-0-47-209685-5.
• Academic Papers by Claudia Goldin.
• Interview with Goldin by The Region of the Minneapolis Fed