James J. Heckman

James J. Heckman
(1944)


James Heckman is Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago where he has served since 1973. He holds a parallel appointment as Director of Social Program Evaluation at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, and is also a Senior Research Fellow at the American Bar Foundation.

Heckman's research combines both methodological and empirical interests in evaluating the impact of a variety of social programs on the economy and on the society at large. He has written on the impact of civil rights and affirmative action programs in the U.S., on the impact of taxes on labor supply and human capital accumulation on the impact of public and private job training on earnings and employment, on the impact of unionism on labor markets in developing countries and on the impact of skill certification programs.

He has also contributed substantially on the literature both in applied and theoretical econometrics. His methodological work on selection bias and on the evaluation of social programs is widely used as is his research on the analysis of heterogeneity in consumer preferences and in the analysis of longitudinal data. He has a series of influential papers on the identifiability of broad classes of econometric models.

He edited the Econometric Monograph series volume Longitudinal Analysis of Labor Market Data and is the author of two forthcoming technical monographs:

(1) Evaluating Social Programs: Methodological and Empirical Lessons From a Prototypical Job Training Program (Chicago, 2000)
and
(2) Incentives in Government Bureaucracies: Can Incentives in Bureaucracies Emulate Market Efficiency? (UpJohn-Chicago, 2000).

His 1995 Harris Lectures at Harvard, The Economic Approach To Social Program Evaluation are currently under revision for publication by Harvard University Press.

Heckman has received numerous honors for his research. He is a fellow of the Econometric Society, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the National Academy of Sciences. He received the John Bates Clark Award of the American Economic Association in 1983.