Lawrence Katz named Citation Laureate — Harvard Gazette

Lawrence Katz, the Elisabeth Allison Professor of Economics, has been named a 2025 Citation Laureate, an annual award that acknowledges influential researchers thought of prone to win the Nobel Prize of their subject.

The pioneering labor economist, who joined Harvard’s school in 1986, has produced many years of extremely cited findings on wages, inequality, and technological change. According to London-based Clarivate, the corporate that publishes the annual listing of awardees, Katz now totals almost 26,000 citations throughout 72 educational publications.

“It’s very nice to see the research recognized,” stated Katz, who was honored with Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor David H. Autor, M.A. ’94, Ph.D. ’99. “It’s particularly nice that it’s shared with my longtime collaborator and former student. We’ve done a lot of work together.”

A complete of twenty-two Citation Laureates had been introduced this yr, with Clarivate touting its program as a shortlist of worthy recipients for the world’s prime scientific distinction. Since 2002, 83 Citation Laureates have gone on to win Nobel Prizes.

Katz, who can also be the editor of The Quarterly Journal of Economics, mentioned the whole lot from AI to the facility of connecting throughout socioeconomic class on this dialog, which has been edited for readability and size.

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Let’s begin by revisiting “The Race Between Education and Technology” (2008), co-authored together with your spouse, the financial historian and Nobel laureate Claudia Goldin. The e-book feels so related as we speak.

We had been constructing on work by the primary Nobel Prize winner in economics, Jan Tinbergen, who confirmed that enhancements in productiveness and new data have a tendency to extend the demand for extremely educated staff. Claudia and I documented rising inequality throughout a lot of the nineteenth century. The U.S. had shifted from what you may name the artisanal store, with a number of tacit data realized by expertise, to mass manufacturing. That tended to erode the worth of particular person craft staff’ abilities. But it elevated the demand for bookkeepers, managers, engineers, and expert manufacturing staff.

“We showed that inequality narrowed during first half of the 20th century, when education kept pace with technological change.”

Then the U.S. began increasing entry to training within the early Twentieth century by way of a grassroots highschool motion. Access to highschool allowed many extra individuals to shift from agriculture to trade, from operative and labor positions to clerical and managerial jobs with very excessive financial returns on their training. We confirmed that inequality narrowed throughout first half of the Twentieth century, when training saved tempo with technological change.

And then within the mid-Twentieth century, as we shifted to the Information Age, the returns on a university training began rising. For some time, the U.S. did a reasonably good job of increasing entry to increased training. Think of state universities in-built Florida or California. But that slowed down with funding cutbacks within the Nineteen Eighties and ’90s.

How did financial inequality change into an curiosity?

I grew up in Los Angeles, the place I used to be concerned as a Ok-12 pupil with some college integration applications. And my mom was a psychologist in a few of our district’s much less prosperous colleges. I simply bumped into so many gifted individuals who didn’t have the identical alternatives.

Trying to grasp the lifelong impression of neighborhoods and colleges has been a spotlight from the beginning. Going to UC Berkeley, and simply being within the Bay Area, impressed me as an undergraduate to work on land-use regulation and residential segregation in California. I studied what as we speak is known as NIMBYism. If the voters in each space attempt to maximize their very own property values with out contemplating entry for individuals who aren’t of their jurisdictions, the broader polity received’t construct enough housing and finally ends up with extremely segregated outcomes by socioeconomic standing.

But by imposing some restrictions on particular person communities that wish to ban new multifamily housing, a state resembling Massachusetts or California may find yourself with much less segregation and big advantages — each for people who find themselves much less advantaged and for better variety of interactions for extra advantaged youngsters.

How did the financial forces of the Nineteen Eighties, whenever you had been a pupil, additional drive your pursuits?

Back then, the rising gaps between the extra and the much less educated had been simply very clear. I might see it by numbers from the Current Population Survey. I noticed one thing I’ve referred to as the “fractal” nature of rising inequality. It was rising between training teams, inside training teams. It was rising throughout areas, with richer cities getting even richer.

So I began engaged on frameworks to elucidate what was taking place. My colleague Richard Freeman, Ph.D. ’69, and I ultimately got here up one thing we referred to as “the supply-demand-institutions framework” (1994). We wished to grasp how a lot was resulting from altering know-how, how a lot was resulting from a slowdown in training, and the way a lot was the decline of unions or the stagnant federal minimal wage. We discovered that about three-quarters was resulting from slowdowns in entry to training whereas know-how accelerated.

Another strategy, which I developed with Kevin Murphy, assumed inequality was driven by supply and demand in an effort to decompose the results of know-how, commerce, immigration, and training (1992). We began our mission once I visited the University of Chicago in 1989. At the time, computing was not what it’s as we speak. Analyzing every single yr — every month, for that matter — was a serious endeavor. Putting collectively 25 years of microdata from the Current Population Survey, from 1963 to ’87, was no trivial matter.

You served from 1993 to ’94 because the U.S. Department of Labor’s first chief economist. How did that have form your pondering?

It strengthened the significance of my early work with Kevin Murphy, Richard Freeman, and Claudia Goldin. Having historic narratives, and understanding the info, was extremely essential to understanding what insurance policies to pursue.

I used to be additionally struck by the significance of clear, clear proof from randomized experiments and pure experiments, as seen in medication and lots of sciences. I helped develop the Moving to Opportunity housing mobility demonstration whereas I used to be there as a result of we wished to do a randomized experiment to actually check the impacts of offering low-income households the chance to maneuver to higher-opportunity areas.

I later co-founded, with my former pupil Amy Finkelstein ’95, J-PAL North America to assist different social science researchers do randomized management trials — true experimental work — on the causal results of various insurance policies.

We had been constructing on work that began in labor economics within the Seventies. MCRC, initially the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, did the primary randomized management trial of a job-training program. What they confirmed is that, with out the experiment, you bought deceptive estimates due to what’s often called the choice downside. That is, the kinds of people that enter coaching applications will not be random. A real counterfactual is required.

You’re identified within the subject as an early adopter of huge information. Can you say extra about its energy?

If an LLM had been skilled on only one,000 strains of textual content, it will not be very helpful. The indisputable fact that it’s skilled on trillions makes it superb at answering your questions. Because you must discover the digital twin of that individual getting into a job-training program. If you will get a wealthy historical past of their earnings, their background, and what labor markets they’re in, it’s not a real experiment however it’s possible you’ll come near approximating an experiment. And you’ll be able to validate your findings towards current experimental estimates.

Accessing huge, administrative information is one thing my collaborator, colleague, and former pupil Raj Chetty ’00, Ph.D. ’23, has actually helped develop at Opportunity Insights. Over the subsequent yr, whereas I’m on sabbatical, Raj and I can be revisiting the query of mix experimental and non-experimental information to check totally different applications. We’re significantly centered on workforce coaching initiatives.

“Integrating neighborhoods has big positive gains for less-advantaged kids without negative effects on economic outcomes of the more advantaged.”

You talked about Moving to Opportunity earlier. Two of your former college students recently called it “one of the most important social science field experiments in history.” How do you consider the initiative and its legacy as we speak?

It helped a bunch of youthful students see the facility of a large-scale randomized management trial.

Our unique motivation was proof that childhood environments actually appear to matter for all times outcomes. In the quick run, we might see all of the grownup outcomes. When the households moved to part of their metropolis with better alternative, there wasn’t a lot of an financial return for the mother and father. They nonetheless didn’t have the coaching and training to reap the benefits of it.

But I ultimately labored with Raj and Nathaniel Hendren to follow the kids over the long run (2016). And we discovered that this system actually modified the trajectory for kids. Growing up in a higher-resourced atmosphere had massive constructive results — 30 to 40 % earnings results.

Raj and Nathan’s later work repeated these findings on the nationwide stage (2018). We additionally discover that integrating neighborhoods has huge constructive positive aspects for less-advantaged youngsters with out damaging results on financial outcomes of the extra advantaged.

You’re additionally identified for frequent appearances within the acknowledgement sections of economics papers and books. Can you communicate to the place of educating and mentorship in your profession?

It’s central. Being in a spot like Harvard is so wonderful as a result of we get to work with so many nice undergraduates and graduate college students. It’s a pleasure to be taught from them. But it’s also possible to have a a lot larger impression on science and coverage by influencing their trajectory.