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    Claudia Goldin Wins Nobel in Economics for Studying Women in the Work Force

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    Her research uncovered the reasons for gender gaps in labor force participation and earnings. She is the third woman to win the prize.The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded on Monday to Claudia Goldin, a Harvard professor, for advancing the world’s understanding of women’s progress in the work force.Dr. Goldin is the third woman to have won the economics Nobel, which was first awarded in 1969, and the first one to be honored with it solo rather than sharing in the prize.Who is the winner?Claudia Goldin, 77, is the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University. She has long been a trailblazer in the field — she was the first woman to be offered tenure in Harvard’s economics department, in 1989.She was asleep when the call informing her of the prize came in — she had gotten up earlier to let the dog out but had gone back to bed. She said in an interview that she was “delighted.”She saw a woman winning the economics award on her own as a sort of “culmination” after years of “important changes” toward more gender diversity in the field.Why did the committee say she received the prize?The Nobel committee announced the award in Stockholm. The committee praised Dr. Goldin for her research into female employment, which showed that employment among married women decreased in the 1800s, as the economy moved away from agricultural and toward industry. Women’s participation then increased in the 1900s, as the service sector began to expand as a part of the economy.She also illustrated that the process of closing the gender wage gap has been uneven over the course of history. Recently, progress in closing it has been halting: Today, Women in the United States make a little over 80 cents for every dollar a man makes.In the past, gender wage gaps could be explained by education and occupation. But Dr. Goldin has shown that most of the earnings difference is now between men and women in the same jobs, the Nobel committee said. Notably, it kicks in after the birth of a woman’s first child.In a 15-year study of business school students at the University of Chicago, for instance, Goldin and her colleagues found in one paper that the gap in pay started to widen a year or two after a woman had her first baby.“Claudia Goldin’s discoveries have vast societal implications,” said Randi Hjalmarsson, a member of the committee and professor of economics at the University of Gothenburg.Dr. Goldin said that she hoped people would take away from her work how important long-term changes are to understanding the labor market.“We see a residue of history around us,” she said, explaining that societal and family structures that women and men grow up in shape their behavior and economic outcomes.While there has been “monumental progressive change, at the same time there are important differences,” she said, and those differences often tie back to women doing more work in the home. “We’re never going to have gender equality until we also have couple equity.”Who won the 2022 Nobel for economics?Last year, the award went to Ben S. Bernanke, the former Federal Reserve chair, along with Douglas W. Diamond of the University of Chicago and Philip H. Dybvig of Washington University in St. Louis. They won for work that has reshaped how the world understands the relationship between banks and financial crises.The economics prize was established in memory of Alfred Nobel by Sweden’s central bank and is awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.Who else has won a Nobel Prize this year?The award for physiology or medicine went to Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman for their discoveries that led to the development of effective vaccines against Covid-19.The prize in physics was shared by Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier for techniques that illuminate the subatomic realm of electrons.The award for chemistry went to Moungi G. Bawendi, Louis E. Brus and Alexei I. Ekimov for the discovery and development of quantum dots, nanoparticles so small that their size determines their properties.The literature prize went to the Norwegian novelist, poet and playwright Jon Fosse “for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable.”The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Narges Mohammadi, Iran’s most prominent human rights activist and an inmate in the country’s notorious Evin Prison, “for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all.” More

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    The Pandemic’s Job Market Myths

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    Remember the “she-cession”? What about the early-retirement wave, or America’s army of quiet quitters?For economists and other forecasters, the pandemic and postpandemic economy has been a lesson in humility. Time and again, predictions about ways in which the labor market had been permanently changed have proved temporary or even illusory.Women lost jobs early in the pandemic but have returned in record numbers, making the she-cession a short-lived phenomenon. Retirements spiked along with coronavirus deaths, but many older workers have come back to the job market. Even the person credited with provoking a national conversation by posting a TikTok video about doing the bare minimum at your job has suggested that “quiet quitting” may not be the way of the future — he’s into quitting out loud these days.That is not to say nothing has changed. In a historically strong labor market with very low unemployment, workers have a lot more power than is typical, so they are winning better wages and new perks. And a shift toward working from home for many white-collar jobs is still reshaping the economy in subtle but important ways.But the big takeaway from the pandemic recovery is simple: The U.S. labor market was not permanently worsened by the hit it suffered. It echoes the aftermath of the 2008 recession, when economists were similarly skeptical of the labor market’s ability to bounce back — and similarly proved wrong once the economy strengthened.“The profession has not fully digested the lessons of the recovery from the Great Recession,” said Adam Ozimek, the chief economist at the Economic Innovation Group, a research organization in Washington. One of those lessons, he said: “Don’t bet against the U.S. worker.”Here is a rundown of the labor market narratives that rose and fell over the course of the pandemic recovery.True but Over: The ‘She-cession’Women lost jobs heavily early in the pandemic, and people fretted that they would be left lastingly worse off in the labor market — but that has not proved to be the case.

    Note: Data is as of June 2023 and is seasonally adjusted.Source: Bureau of Labor StatisticsBy The New York TimesIn the wake of the pandemic, employment has actually rebounded faster among women than among men — so much so that, as of June, the employment rate for women in their prime working years, commonly defined as 25 to 54, was the highest on record. (Employment among prime-age men is back to where it was before the pandemic, but is still shy of a record.)Gone: Early RetirementsAnother frequent narrative early in the pandemic: It would cause a wave of early retirements.Historically, when people lose jobs or leave them late in their working lives, they tend not to return to work — effectively retiring, whether or not they label it that way. So when millions of Americans in their 50s and 60s left the labor force early in the pandemic, many economists were skeptical that they would ever come back.

    Notes: Percentages compare June 2023 with the 2019 average. Data is seasonally adjusted.Source: Bureau of Labor StatisticsBy The New York TimesBut the early retirement wave never really materialized. Americans between ages 55 and 64 returned to work just as fast as their younger peers and are now employed at a higher rate than before the pandemic. Some may have been forced back to work by inflation; others had always planned to return and did so as soon as it felt safe.The retirement narrative wasn’t entirely wrong. Americans who are past traditional retirement age — 65 and older — still haven’t come back to work in large numbers. That is helping to depress the size of the overall labor force, especially because the number of Americans in their 60s and 70s is growing rapidly as more baby boomers hit their retirement years.Questionable: The White-Collar RecessionTechnology layoffs at big companies have prompted discussion of a white-collar recession, or one that primarily affects well-heeled technology and information-sector workers. While those firings have undoubtedly been painful for those who experienced them, it has not shown up prominently in overall employment data.

    Note: Data is seasonally adjusted.Source: Bureau of Labor StatisticsBy The New York TimesFor now, the nation’s high-skilled employees seem to be shuffling into new and different jobs pretty rapidly. Unemployment remains very low both for information and for professional and business services — hallmark white-collar industries that encompass much of the technology sector. And layoffs in tech have slowed recently.Nuanced: The Missing MenIt looked for a moment like young and middle-aged men — those between about 25 and 44 — were not coming back to the labor market the way other demographics had been. Over the past few months, though, they have finally been regaining their employment rates before the pandemic.That recovery came much later than for some other groups: For instance, 35-to-44-year-old men have yet to consistently hold on to employment rates that match their 2019 average, while last year women in that age group eclipsed their employment rate before the pandemic. But the recent progress suggests that even if men are taking longer to recover, they are slowly making gains.False (Again): The Labor Market Won’t Fully Bounce BackAll these narratives share a common thread: While some cautioned against drawing early conclusions, many labor market experts were skeptical that the job market would fully recover from the shock of the pandemic, at least in the short term. Instead, the rebound has been swift and broad, defying gloomy narratives.This isn’t the first time economists have made this mistake. It’s not even the first time this century. The crippling recession that ended in 2009 pushed millions of Americans out of the labor force, and many economists embraced so-called structural explanations for why they were slow to return. Maybe workers’ skills or professional networks had eroded during their long periods of unemployment. Maybe they were addicted to opioids, or drawing disability benefits, or trapped in parts of the country with few job opportunities.In the end, though, a much simpler explanation proved correct. People were slow to return to work because there weren’t enough jobs for them. As the economy healed and opportunities improved, employment rebounded among pretty much every demographic group.The rebound from the pandemic recession has played out much faster than the one that took place after the 2008 downturn, which was worsened by a global financial blowup and a housing market collapse that left long-lasting scars. But the basic lesson is the same. When jobs are plentiful, most people will go to work.“People want to adapt, and people want to work: Those things are generally true,” said Julia Coronado, the founder of MacroPolicy Perspectives, a research firm. She noted that the pool of available workers expanded further with time and amid solid immigration. “People are resilient. They figure things out.” More

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    Harry Markowitz, Nobel-Winning Pioneer of Modern Portfolio Theory, Dies at 95

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    He overturned the traditional approach to buying stocks by examining the relationship between risk and reward.Harry M. Markowitz, an economist who launched a revolution in finance, upending traditional thinking about buying stocks and earning the Nobel in economic science in 1990 for his breakthrough, died on Thursday in San Diego. He was 95.The death, at a hospital, was caused by pneumonia and sepsis, Mary McDonald, a longtime assistant to Dr. Markowitz, said.Until Dr. Markowitz came along, the investment world assumed that the best stock-market strategy was simply to choose the shares of a group of companies that were thought to have the best prospects.But in 1952, he published his dissertation, “Portfolio Selection,” which overturned this common sense approach with what became known as modern portfolio theory, widely referred to as M.P.T.The heart of his research was grounded in the basic relationship between risk and reward. He showed that the risk in any portfolio is less dependent on the riskiness of its component stocks and other assets than how they relate to one another. It was the first time that the benefits of diversification had been codified and quantified, using advanced mathematics to calculate correlations and variations from the mean.This breakthrough insight and its corollaries have now permeated all aspects of money management, with few professionals unfamiliar with his work.“Modern portfolio theory has gone from the halls of academia to investment management mainstream, or from gown to town,” Robert Arnott, chief executive of Research Associates, a large investment manager in Newport Beach, Calif., said in a videotaped interview with Dr. Markowitz.When Dr. Markowitz heard one of his peers describe how his work had brought “a process” to what had been, until the 1950s, the “haphazard” creation of institutional portfolios, he knew he deserved his reputation as the father of modern portfolio theory, he said.“That moment was one of these things where you feel a chill run up your spine,” he said. “I understood what I had started.”In 1999, the financial newspaper Pensions & Investments named him “man of the century.”Related work on investments led Dr. Markowitz to be regarded as a pioneer of behavioral finance, the study of how people make choices in practical situations, as in buying insurance or lottery tickets.Recognizing that the pain of loss typically exceeds the joy of comparable gain, he found it crucial to know how a gamble is framed in terms of possible outcomes and the size of the stakes.Dr. Markowitz won renown in two other fields. He developed “sparse matrix” techniques for solving very large mathematical optimization problems — techniques that are now standard in production software for optimization programs. And he designed and supervised the development of Simscript, which is used for programming computer simulations of systems like factories, transportation and communications networks.In 1989 Dr. Markowitz received the John von Neumann Theory Prize from the Operations Research Society of America for his work in portfolio theory, sparse matrix techniques and Simscript.His focus was always on applying mathematics and computers to practical problems, particularly involving business in uncertain conditions.“I’m not a one-shot Nobel laureate — only doing one thing,” Dr. Markowitz said in an interview for this obituary in 2014. Although he was 87 at the time, he was embarked on a monumental analysis of securities risk and return. The seminal 1952 paper, in The Journal of Finance, was expanded into his best-known work, “Portfolio Selection: Efficient Diversification of Investments,” in 1959.Harry Max Markowitz was born on Aug. 24, 1927, in Chicago, the only child of Morris and Mildred Markowitz, who owned a small grocery store. In high school he began to read the original works of Darwin and such classical philosophers as René Descartes and David Hume. In financial terms, Hume’s work lay behind the maxim that past performance is not a guide to the future.He continued on this track in a two-year bachelor’s program at the University of Chicago, where, inspired in part by Hume’s focus on the uncertainty of knowledge, he decided to pursue economics.It was in graduate school, where he studied under Milton Friedman and other eminent economists, that a chance conversation on possible dissertation topics led to his work applying mathematical methods to the stock market.The basic concepts of portfolio theory came to Dr. Markowitz one afternoon in the library while reading an investment book by the economist John Burr Williams.Dr. Markowitz was awarded the Nobel in economic science in 1990, sharing it with Merton H. Miller and William F. Sharpe.Sandy Huffaker for The New York Times“Williams proposed that the value of a stock should equal the present value of its future dividends,” Dr. Markowitz wrote in a brief autobiography for the Nobel committee. “Since future dividends are uncertain, I interpreted Williams’s proposal to be to value a stock by its expected future dividends.”But if investors were interested only in the expected values of securities, he figured, then that implied that the best, or maximized, portfolio would consist of the single most appealing stock.“This, I knew, was not the way investors did or should act,” he concluded. “Investors diversify because they are concerned with risk as well as return.”He set out to measure the relationships among a diverse assortment of stocks to construct the most efficient portfolio, and to chart what he called a “frontier,” where no additional return can be obtained without also increasing risk.At the RAND Corporation, during stints in the 1950s and ’60s, Dr. Markowitz worked on practical problems in American industry that required the development of simulation methods; he created the Simscript language to reduce their programming time.He went on to work for IBM and General Electric, where he built models of manufacturing plants. In 1962 he co-founded the California Analysis Center Incorporated, a computer-software company that would become CACI International.Dr. Markowitz’s first two marriages, to Luella Johnson and Gloria Hardt, ended in divorce. In 1970 he married Barbara Gay. She died in 2021.Mr. Markowitz is survived by two children from his first marriage, Susan Ulvestad and David Markowitz; two from his second, Laurie Raskin and Steven Markowitz; his wife’s son from a previous marriage, James Marks; 13 grandchildren; and more than a dozen great-grandchildren. He lived in San Diego.Dr. Markowitz in his office in 2012. “I’m not a one-shot Nobel laureate — only doing one thing,” he said in an interview in 2014.Sandy Huffaker for The New York TimesIn 1968 Dr. Markowitz began to manage a successful hedge fund, Arbitrage Management Company, based on M.P.T., that is believed to have been the first to engage in computerized arbitrage trading.Dr. Markowitz was a professor at Baruch College of the City University of New York when he was awarded the Nobel in economic science, sharing it with Merton H. Miller and William F. Sharpe. He also served on the faculties of Rutgers University, the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, the University of California at Los Angeles and finally at the Rady School of Management at the University of California, San Diego.After submitting his landmark dissertation, Dr. Markowitz took a job at RAND and was fully confident that “I know this stuff cold” when he returned to Chicago in 1955 to defend it.Within a few minutes, however, Professor Friedman told him that while he could find no mistakes, the topic was extremely novel. “We cannot award you a Ph.D. in economics for a dissertation that is not economics,” he said.At this point, Dr. Markowitz recounted, “my palms began to sweat” and he was sent into a hallway, where he waited for about five minutes.Finally, a panel member emerged and said, “Congratulations, Dr. Markowitz.”Dr. Markowitz insisted that he had not suspected the joke.Alex Traub More

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    Harvard’s Francesca Gino, Dishonesty Expert, Is Accused of Fraud

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    Questions about a widely cited paper are the latest to be raised about methods used in behavioral research.Over the past two decades, dozens of behavioral scientists have risen to prominence pointing out the power of small interventions to improve well-being.The scientists said they had found that automatically enrolling people in organ donor programs would lead to higher rates of donation, and that moving healthy foods like fruit closer to the front of a buffet line would result in healthier eating.Many of these findings have attracted skepticism as other scholars showed that their effects were smaller than initially claimed, or that they had little impact at all. But in recent days, the field may have sustained its most serious blow yet: accusations that a prominent behavioral scientist fabricated results in multiple studies, including at least one purporting to show how to elicit honest behavior.The scholar, Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School, has been a co-author of dozens of papers in peer-reviewed journals on such topics as how rituals like silently counting to 10 before deciding what to eat can increase the likelihood of choosing healthier food, and how networking can make professionals feel dirty.Maurice Schweitzer, a behavioral scientist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, said the accusations were having large “reverberations in the academic community” because Dr. Gino is someone who has “so many collaborators, so many articles, who is really a leading scholar in the field.”Dr. Schweitzer said that he was now going through the eight papers on which he collaborated with Dr. Gino for indications of fraud, and that many other scholars were doing so as well.Behavioral work is common in psychology, management and economics, and scholars can straddle these disciplines. According to her résumé, Dr. Gino has a Ph.D. in economics and management from an Italian university.Questions about her work surfaced in an article on June 16 in The Chronicle of Higher Education about a 2012 paper written by Dr. Gino and four colleagues. One of Dr. Gino’s co-authors — Max H. Bazerman, also of Harvard Business School — told The Chronicle that the university had informed him that a study overseen by Dr. Gino for the paper appeared to include fabricated results.The 2012 paper reported that asking people who fill out tax or insurance documents to attest to the truth of their responses at the top of the document rather than at the bottom significantly increased the accuracy of the information they provided. The paper has been cited hundreds of times by other scholars, but more recent work had cast serious doubt on its findings.Dr. Gino did not respond to a request for comment, and Harvard Business School declined to comment. Reached by phone, a man who identified himself as Dr. Gino’s husband said, “It’s obviously something that is very sensitive that we can’t speak to now.”Dr. Bazerman did not respond to a request for comment for this article, but told The Chronicle of Higher Education that he had had nothing to do with any fabrication.On June 17, a blog run by three behavioral scientists, called DataColada, posted a detailed discussion of evidence that the results of a study by Dr. Gino for the 2012 paper had been falsified. The post said that the bloggers contacted Harvard Business School in the fall of 2021 to raise concerns about Dr. Gino’s work, providing the university with a report that included evidence of fraud in the 2012 paper as well as in three other papers on which she collaborated.The blog — by Uri Simonsohn of ESADE Business School in Barcelona, Leif Nelson of the University of California, Berkeley, and Joseph Simmons of the University of Pennsylvania — focuses on the integrity and reliability of social science research. The post on Dr. Gino noted that Harvard had placed her on administrative leave, a fact that was reflected on her business school web page, though no reason was given. The Internet Archive, which catalogs web pages, shows that Dr. Gino was not on leave as recently as mid-May.The 2012 paper was based on three separate studies. One study overseen by Dr. Gino involved a lab experiment in which about 100 participants were asked to complete a worksheet featuring 20 puzzles and were promised $1 for every puzzle they solved.The study’s participants later filled out a form reporting how much money they had earned from solving the puzzles. The participants were led to believe that cheating would be undetected, when in fact the researchers could verify how many puzzles they had solved.The study found that participants were much more likely to report their puzzle income honestly if they attested to the accuracy of their responses at the top of the form rather than the bottom.But in their blog post, Dr. Simonsohn, Dr. Nelson and Dr. Simmons, analyzing data that Dr. Gino and her co-authors had posted online, cited a digital record contained within an Excel file to demonstrate that some of the data points had been tampered with, and that the tampering helped drive the result.Last week’s post was not the first time the DataColada watchdogs had found problems with the 2012 paper by Dr. Gino and her co-authors. In a blog post in August 2021, the same researchers found evidence that another study published in the same paper appeared to rely on manufactured data.That study relied on data provided by an insurance company, to which customers reported the mileage of cars covered by their policy. The study purported to find that customers who were asked at the top of the form to attest to the truthfulness of the information they would provide were significantly more honest than customers who were asked to attest to their truthfulness at the bottom of the form.But through analysis of the raw data, Dr. Simonsohn, Dr. Nelson and Dr. Simmons concluded that many of the data points were created by someone connected to the study, not based on customer information. The journal that published the 2012 paper, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, retracted it the month after the blog post appeared.In that case, another of the paper’s co-authors, Dan Ariely of Duke University, was the scholar who procured the data from the insurance company. Dr. Ariely, one of the world’s best-known behavioral scientists, said in an email on Friday that he had been “stunned and surprised” to learn that some of the insurance data in the paper had been fabricated, “which led me to proactively retract it.”DataColada has since published blog posts laying out evidence that results were fabricated in two other papers of which Dr. Gino was a co-author. The bloggers have written that they plan to publish one more post laying out issues in an additional paper on which she collaborated.In interviews and comments on social media, some scholars said that findings in the genre of behavioral research that Dr. Gino specializes in, which is closer to psychology, often resemble findings generated by questionable research methods.One category of questionable methods, said Colin Camerer, a behavioral economist at the California Institute of Technology, is p-hacking — for example, testing a series of arbitrary data combinations until the researcher arrives at an inflated statistical correlation.In 2015, a team of scholars reported that they had tried to replicate the results of 100 studies published in prominent psychology journals and succeeded in fewer than half the cases. The behavioral studies proved especially hard to replicate. More

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    William E. Spriggs, Economist Who Pushed for Racial Justice, Dies at 68

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    An educator who served in the Obama administration, he championed workers, especially Black workers, and challenged his profession’s racial assumptions.William E. Spriggs, who in a four-decade career in economics sought to root out racial injustice in society and in his own profession, died on Tuesday in Reston, Va. He was 68.The A.F.L.-C.I.O., for which Dr. Spriggs had been chief economist for more than a decade, announced his death. His wife of 38 years, Jennifer Spriggs, said the cause was a stroke.One of the most prominent Black economists of his generation, Dr. Spriggs served as an assistant secretary of labor in the Obama administration and held other public-sector roles earlier in his career. But he was best known for his work outside of government as an outspoken and frequently quoted advocate for workers, especially Black workers.In addition to his role at the A.F.L.-C.I.O., based in Washington, he was a professor at Howard University, where he mentored a generation of Black economists while pushing for change within a field dominated by white men.“Bill was somebody who was deeply committed to the idea that we do economics because we have a social purpose,” William A. Darity Jr., a Duke University economist and longtime friend, said in a phone interview. “That this is not a discipline that should be deployed just for playing parlor games, and that we should use the ideas that we develop from economics for the design of social policy that will make the lives of most people far better.”Dr. Spriggs worked on varied issues, including trade, education, the minimum wage and Social Security. But the topic he came back to most frequently, and spoke most passionately about, was that of racial disparities in the labor market. Black Americans, he pointed out time and again, consistently experienced unemployment at double the rate of white people — a troubling fact that he argued got too little attention among economists.“Economists have tried to rationalize this disparity by saying it merely reflects differences in skill levels,” Dr. Spriggs wrote in an opinion article in The New York Times in 2021, before going on to dismiss that claim with a striking statistic: The unemployment rate for white high school dropouts is almost always below that of overall Black unemployment.During the nationwide racial reckoning after the death of George Floyd in 2020, Dr. Spriggs wrote an open letter to his fellow economists that was sharply critical of the field’s approach to race — not just in its failure to recruit and retain Black economists, which had been widely documented, but also in economic research.“Modern economics has a deep and painful set of roots that too few economists acknowledge,” Dr. Spriggs wrote. “In the hands of far too many economists, it remains with the assumption that African Americans are inferior until proven otherwise.”Biden administration officials said they had discussed appointing Dr. Spriggs to senior economic policy roles as recently as this year. In the end, he remained on the outside, nudging the administration in public and private not to back off its commitment to ensuring a strong economic recovery. In recent months he was a vocal critic of the Federal Reserve’s aggressive efforts to tame inflation, which Dr. Spriggs warned would disproportionately hurt Black workers.“Bill was a towering figure in his field, a trailblazer who challenged the field’s basic assumptions about racial discrimination in labor markets, pay equity and worker empowerment,” President Biden said in a statement on Wednesday.Mr. Spriggs speaking with Janet Yellen, then the chair of the Federal Reserve, at a conference in 2014. More recently he was a critic of the Federal Reserve’s aggressive efforts to tame inflation, which he said would disproportionately hurt Black workers.Jonathan Ernst/ReutersWilliam Edward Spriggs was born on April 8, 1955, in Washington to Thurman and Julienne (Henderson) Spriggs. He was reared there and in Virginia. His father had served during World War II as a fighter pilot with the Tuskegee Airmen and went on to become a physics professor at Norfolk State University in Virginia and at Howard, in Washington, both historically Black institutions.His mother was also a veteran and became a public-school teacher in Norfolk after earning her college degree while her son was in elementary school.“I remember studying history together,” Dr. Spriggs later recalled of his mother in a White House blog post written while he was at the Labor Department. “She would check out children’s books covering the topics she was learning about.”Dr. Spriggs earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and political science from Williams College in Massachusetts and attended graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, where he earned a master’s degree in 1979 and a doctorate in 1984, both in economics. While in graduate school, he served as co-president of the graduate student teachers union, helping to rebuild it after a largely unsuccessful strike the year before.Dr. Spriggs stood out at Wisconsin, and not only because he was the only Black graduate student in the economics department, recalled Lawrence Mishel, a classmate who was later president of the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, where Dr. Spriggs also worked for several years.Even as a graduate student, Dr. Mishel said, Mr. Spriggs was skeptical of the orthodox theories that his professors were teaching about how companies set workers’ wages — theories that left no room for discrimination or other forces beyond supply and demand. And unlike most students, Mr. Spriggs wasn’t interested in working for the top-ranked school where he could find a job; he wanted to work for a historically Black institution, as his father had.He got his wish, teaching first at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro and then at Norfolk State University — where his father also worked — before taking a series of jobs in government and left-leaning think tanks. He returned to academia in 2005, when he joined Howard. He was chairman of its economics department from 2005 to 2009.In addition to his wife, whom he met in graduate school, his survivors include their son, William; and two sisters, Patricia Spriggs and Karen Baldwin. Dr. Spriggs had a shaping hand in the careers of dozens of younger economists.“I would not be an economist today without Bill Spriggs,” said Valerie Wilson, director of the Program on Race, Ethnicity and the Economy at the Economic Policy Institute.Dr. Wilson was taking a break from graduate school and considering leaving the field altogether when one of her professors recommended her for a job working for Dr. Spriggs at the National Urban League. He helped restore her passion for economics by showing her an approach to the work that was less theoretical and more focused on the real world, she said. After two years at the Urban League, she told Dr. Spriggs that she was going back to graduate school.His response: “We need you in the profession.”Jim Tankersley More

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    Robert E. Lucas Jr., Nobel-Winning Conservative Economist, Dies at 85

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    Challenging the theories of John Maynard Keynes, he questioned the idea that government intervention could help steer the economy.Robert E. Lucas Jr., a contrarian Nobel laureate in economics who undergirded conservative arguments that government intervention in fiscal policy is often self-defeating, died on Monday in Chicago. He was 85.His death was announced by the University of Chicago, where he began teaching as a professor in 1975 and remained a professor emeritus until his death. The announcement did not cite a cause.In awarding the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1995 to Professor Lucas, the fifth winner in economics from the University of Chicago in six years, the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences described him as “the economist who has had the greatest influence on macroeconomic research since 1970.”While he propounded a number of groundbreaking if sometimes controversial theories, Professor Lucas was best known for his hypothesis of “rational expectations,” advanced in the early 1970s in a critique of macroeconomics.In that critique, he challenged John Maynard Keynes’s long-established doctrine that government could manipulate the economy to achieve certain outcomes through reflexive interventionist policies, such as changing interest rates or taking other steps to increase or curb inflation or reduce unemployment.In the real world, Professor Lucas maintained, consumers and businesses make their decisions on the basis of rational expectations drawn from their own past experiences.“His idea was that macroeconomic models grounded in lots of equations are based primarily on past behavior,” said David R. Henderson, a research fellow with Stanford University’s Hoover Institution in California and an economics professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. “But if people learn from what government does” and respond accordingly in their own self-interest, “those models will poorly predict future behavior.”As a result, Professor Lucas said, government economic policies can be self-defeating by failing to achieve their intended outcomes.As the economics columnist Leonard Silk wrote in The New York Times in 1983, “If people understand and anticipate what government is doing — for instance, in trying to accelerate economic growth by speeding up the increase in the money supply — workers will increase their wage demands and businesses will raise prices, to protect themselves against future inflation, thus negating the government’s intention of increasing real growth.”In an agenda with conservative implications for economic policy, Professor Lucas maintained that government spending that supplants private investment is counterproductive; that the money supply is what matters most; and that policies to reduce inequality by redistributing income, though “seductive,” are “in my opinion the most poisonous” to sound economics.He also favored eliminating taxes on capital gains, or on any income derived from capital. And he embraced supply-side economics, which calls for increasing the supply of goods and services while cutting taxes to promote job creation, business expansion and entrepreneurial activity.“The supply-side economists,” he said in a 1993 interview, “have delivered the largest genuinely free lunch that I have seen in 25 years of this business, and I believe we would be a better society if we followed their advice.”In 1995, not long after eight years under President Ronald Reagan, a champion of supply-side, and four under another Republican, George H.W. Bush, Professor Lucas concluded that “the U.S. economy is in excellent shape,” in part because “the government is not trying to do things with economic policy that it isn’t capable of doing.”And, he said, the same principles that encouraged economic growth in rich countries could be applied to economic development in poorer ones.In a 1988 lecture titled “What Economists Do,” Professor Lucas explained: “We economists have to be storytellers. We do not find that the realm of imagination and ideas is an alternative to, or a retreat from, practical reality. On the contrary, it is the only way we have found to think seriously about reality.”Professor Lucas, right, with three other Nobel laureates in economics from the University of Chicago, from left: James Heckman, Roger Myerson and Gary Becker. Kamil Krzaczynski/European Pressphoto AgencyRobert Emerson Lucas Jr. was born in Yakima, Wash., on Sept. 15, 1937. His mother, Jane (Templeton) Lucas, was a fashion artist. His father ran an ice-cream parlor that went broke during the Depression, after which the family moved to Seattle, where Robert Sr. became a steamfitter in the shipyards and then, after World War II, a welder in a commercial refrigerator company. Years later, though lacking a college degree or any training in engineering, he rose to become the company’s president.Before his father’s fortunes changed, however, Robert Jr., hoping to become an engineer, needed a scholarship to attend college and was offered one by the University of Chicago, though it didn’t have an engineering school. Lacking the nerve to study physics, he said, he became a history major. He graduated in 1959.He then enrolled in a graduate program in economics at the University of California, Berkeley. But, again needing financial support, he returned to the University of Chicago, where he studied under the conservative economist Milton Friedman, who would receive the Nobel in economics in 1976. Professor Lucas earned his doctorate in economics in 1964.He taught at what is now Carnegie Mellon University from 1963 to 1974, then returned to the University of Chicago as a professor in 1975.In 1959 he married Rita Cohen, a fellow student at Chicago. They separated in 1982 and divorced several years later. Among his survivors are their sons, Stephen and Joseph; his partner, Prof. Nancy L. Stokey, with whom he collaborated on some of his research at the University of Chicago; a sister, Jenepher Spurr; a brother, Peter; and five grandchildren.Six years before Professor Lucas won his Nobel, his estranged wife expressed great faith in his future. Her lawyer inserted a clause in their divorce agreement stipulating that she would receive half of any Nobel money he might receive if the honor was awarded before Oct. 31, 1995. He received the prize barely three weeks before that deadline.Professor Lucas was philosophical about collecting $300,000 instead of the full $600,000. He might have balked during the divorce negotiations, he said, if he had had a greater rational expectation that he would become a Nobel laureate.“A deal is a deal,” he said at the time. “She got the whole house. Getting half of the prize was better than nothing.” More

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    Republican Economists Line Up Behind Biden Nominee

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    Jared Bernstein, the president’s choice for chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, won praise for his work that led to a provision in the Trump tax cuts in 2017.WASHINGTON — Nearly every living economist who led the White House Council of Economic Advisers in a Republican administration — including the three chairs under President Donald J. Trump — signed a letter urging Congress to confirm President Biden’s new nominee to lead the council, Jared Bernstein.The letter, obtained by The New York Times, praises Mr. Bernstein for engaging with economists across ideological lines and for his work drafting the original proposal for the opportunity zones program that was included in the 2017 tax package that Mr. Trump signed into law.The Senate Banking Committee is scheduled to hold a hearing on Mr. Bernstein’s nomination on Tuesday. Democrats had worried about his chances of clearing a committee vote after Senator John Fetterman, Democrat of Pennsylvania, was hospitalized in February for treatment of depression. They had stepped up efforts to court Republican senators to support Mr. Bernstein. Mr. Fetterman has since returned to work in the Senate.Mr. Bernstein has been a member of the council since the start of Mr. Biden’s administration. The president tapped him to succeed Cecilia Rouse, who stepped down at the end of last month to return to her post at Princeton University. Before then, Mr. Bernstein was an adviser to Mr. Biden when he was the vice president, a longtime fixture at liberal think tanks in Washington and a frequent sparring partner with conservative economists on cable news.He also worked with Kevin Hassett, a conservative economist who went on to head the council under Mr. Trump, to draft a white paper for the Economic Innovation Group think tank about a novel effort meant to steer investment to impoverished parts of the United States. Those were the so-called opportunity zones, which were included in the 2017 tax law.The program designates areas in every state where investors in real estate, operating businesses or other projects are eligible for significant tax advantages, including potentially not having to pay capital gains taxes on profits from their investments in those areas.Republicans have championed the zones since the law was passed. Some critics, including in Washington think tanks, have criticized them for delivering investments to some areas that were already gentrifying rapidly. Recent research has shown a widening share of zones attracting investment in the years since they were established.Mr. Hassett, who spearheaded the letter to members of the Banking Committee on Mr. Bernstein’s behalf, and his fellow former heads of the council cited the idea for the zones as one example of Mr. Bernstein’s outside-the-box thinking on economics.Mr. Bernstein has “established a reputation for producing informative, data-driven analysis and developing creative policy ideas,” the former heads of the council wrote.Along with Mr. Hassett, two other acting heads of the council under Mr. Trump signed the letter: Tomas Phillipson and Tyler Goodspeed. Other signatories included Michael J. Boskin, who led the council under President George H.W. Bush, and three chairs under President George W. Bush: Ben S. Bernanke, N. Gregory Mankiw and R. Glenn Hubbard.Mr. Hassett said he had been unable to reach the only other living past chair of the council under a Republican, Alan Greenspan, to ask him to sign the letter.In an interview, Mr. Hassett praised Mr. Bernstein’s collegiality and suggested that he would continue a bipartisan tradition of council chairs seeking advice from their predecessors from both political parties.“I disagree with Jared about a lot, and Jared and I have been disagreeing about things for 20 years,” Mr. Hassett said. “But he really is a fundamentally good person who tries to figure things out with an open mind, and who changes his mind.” More

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    White House Aims to Reflect the Environment in Economic Data

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    The Biden administration has set out to measure the economic value of ecosystems, offering new statistics to weigh in policy decisions.Forests that keep hillsides from eroding and clean the air. Wetlands that protect coastal real estate from storm surges. Rivers and deep snows that attract tourists and create jobs in rural areas. All of those are natural assets of perhaps obvious value — but none are accounted for by traditional measurements of economic activity.On Thursday, the Biden administration unveiled an effort to change that by creating a system for assessing the worth of healthy ecosystems to humanity. The results could inform governmental decisions like which industries to support, which natural resources to preserve and which regulations to pass.The administration’s special envoy for climate change, John Kerry, announced the plan in a speech at the World Economic Forum, the annual gathering of political and business leaders in Davos, Switzerland. “With this plan, the U.S. will put nature on the national balance sheet,” he said.The initiative will require the help of many corners of the executive branch to integrate the new methods into policy. The private sector is likely to take note as well, given rising awareness that extreme weather can wreak havoc on assets — and demand investment in renewable energy and sustainable agriculture.In the past, such undertakings have been politically contentious, as conservatives and industry groups have fought data collection that they saw as an impetus to regulation.A White House report said the effort would take about 15 years. When the standards are fully developed and phased in, researchers will still be able to use gross domestic product as currently defined — but they will also have expanded statistics that take into account a broader sweep of nature’s economic contribution, both tangible and intangible.Those statistics will help more accurately measure the impact of a hurricane, for example. As currently measured, a huge storm can propel economic growth, even though it leaves behind muddied rivers and denuded coastlines — diminishing resources for fishing, transportation, tourism and other economic uses.“You can look at the TV and know that we’ve lost beaches, we’ve lost lots of stuff that we really care about, that makes our lives better,” said Eli Fenichel, an assistant director at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. “And you get an economist to go on and say, ‘G.D.P.’s going to go up this quarter because we’re going to spend a lot of money rebuilding.’ Being able to have these kinds of data about our natural assets, we can say, ‘That’s nice, but we’ve also lost here, so let’s have a more informed conversation going forward.’”John Kerry, the White House’s special envoy on climate, in Davos, Switzerland, this week. A Biden administration plan would incorporate the value of ecosystems into measurements of economic activity.Markus Schreiber/Associated PressTaking nature into economic calculations, known as natural capital accounting, is not a new concept. As early as the 1910s, economists began to think about how to put a number on the contribution of biodiversity, or the damage of air pollution. Prototype statistics emerged in the 1970s, and in 1994, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis proposed a way to augment its accounting tools with measures of environmental health and output.But Congress ordered the bureau to halt its efforts until an independent review could be completed. States whose economies depend on drilling, mining and other forms of natural resource extraction were particularly worried that the data could be used for more stringent regulation.“They thought that anything that measured the question of productivity of natural resources was inherently an environmental trick,” a Commerce Department official said afterward. Five years later, that independent review was completed in a report for the National Academy of Sciences. The academy panel — led by the Yale economist William Nordhaus, who went on to win the Nobel Prize for his work on the economic impact of climate change — said the bureau should continue.“Natural resources such as petroleum, minerals, clean water and fertile soils are assets of the economy in much the same way as are computers, homes and trucks,” the report read. “An important part of the economic picture is therefore missing if natural assets are omitted in creating the national balance sheet.”While the United States lagged, other countries moved ahead with incorporating nature into their core accounting. The United Nations developed a framework for doing so over the last decade that supported decisions such as assessing the impact of shrinking peat land and protecting an endangered species of tree. Britain has been publishing environmental-economic statistics for several years as well. International groups like the Network for Greening the Financial System, which includes most of the world’s central banks, use some of these techniques for assessing systemic risk in the financial system.The proposed plan will take into account a broader sweep of nature’s economic contribution, both tangible and intangible.Chanell Stone for The New York TimesSkepticism about including environmental considerations in economic and financial decision-making remains in the United States, where conservatives have disparaged investing guidelines that put a priority on a company’s performance along environmental, social and governance lines. The social cost of carbon, another measurement tool for assessing the economic impact of regulations through their effect on carbon emissions, was set close to zero during the Trump administration and has been increased significantly under President Biden.Understand Inflation and How It Affects YouFederal Reserve: Federal Reserve officials kicked off 2023 by grappling with a thorny question: How should central bankers understand inflation after 18 months of repeatedly misjudging it?Social Security: The cost-of-living adjustment, which helps the benefit keep pace with inflation, is set for 8.7 percent in 2023. Here is what that means.Tax Rates: The I.R.S. has made inflation adjustments for 2023, which could push many people into a lower tax bracket and reduce tax bills.Your Paycheck: Inflation is taking a bigger and bigger bite out of your wallet. Now, it’s going to affect the size of your paycheck in 2023.Benjamin Zycher, a senior fellow at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, expressed concern Thursday that the new approach would introduce a degree of subjectivity.“I think there’s a real danger that if in fact they’re trying to put environmental quality values into the national accounts, there’s no straightforward way to do that, and it’s impossible that it wouldn’t be politicized,” Dr. Zycher said in an interview. “That’s going to be a process deeply fraught with problems and dubious interpretations.”Few economic statistics are a perfect representation of reality, however, and all of them have to be refined to make sure they are consistent and comparable over time. Measuring the value of nature is inherently tricky, since there is often no market price to consult, but other sources of information can be equally illuminating. The Bureau of Economic Analysis has undertaken other efforts to measure the value of services that are never sold, like household labor.“That’s exactly why we need this sort of strategy,” said Nathaniel Keohane, president of the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, a research and advocacy group. “To really develop the data we need so that it’s not subjective, and make sure we are really devoting the same quality control and focus on integrity that we do to other areas of economic statistics.”The strategy does not pretend to cover every aspect of nature’s value, or solve problems of environmental justice simply by more fully incorporating nature’s contribution, particularly for Indigenous communities. Those concerns, said Rachelle Gould, an associate professor of environmental studies at the University of Vermont, will need to be prioritized separately.“There are a lot of other ways nature matters that can’t be accounted for in monetary terms,” Dr. Gould said. “It’s appropriately cautious about what might be possible.” More