Lawrence F. Katz

This article is about the American economist. For the American neuroscientist, see Larry Katz.

• Official website
• Information at IDEAS / RePEc

Larry Katz
Born	Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S.
Academic background
Education	University of California, Berkeley (BA) Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MA, PhD)
Doctoral advisor	Henry Farber

Lawrence Francis Katz is an American economist who is the Elisabeth Allison Professor of Economics at Harvard University and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. ^{[10] [11]}

Education and career

Katz graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1981. He earned a Ph.D. in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1985. ^[10]

He served as the chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor from 1993 to 1994 under Robert Reich, Bill Clinton's then Secretary of Labor. ^[12]

Katz is married to a Harvard colleague, 2023 Nobel Prize in Economics winner Claudia Goldin, and has also worked with her. ^{[13] [14]} They wrote the book The Race Between Education and Technology in 2008, which argued that the United States became the world's richest nation thanks to its schools. ^[15] It was praised as "a monumental achievement that supplies a unified framework for interpreting how the demand and supply of human capital have shaped the distribution of earnings in the U.S. labor market over the twentieth century", ^[16] and Alan Krueger of Princeton University said that it "represent[ed] the best of what economics has to offer". ^[17]

Katz has been editor of the Quarterly Journal of Economics since 1991. ^[18] He also serves as the Principal Investigator for the long-term evaluation of the Moving to Opportunity, a randomized housing mobility experiment. This project evaluated questions like "To what extent does where you live determine how you live?" ^[19]

He is the co-Scientific Director of J-PAL North America, past President of the Society of Labor Economists, and has been elected a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, and the Society of Labor Economists. Katz serves on the Panel of Economic Advisers of the Congressional Budget Office as well as on the Boards of the Russell Sage Foundation and MDRC. ^[10]

References

1. Gruber, Jonathan Holmes (1992). Changes in the structure of employer-provided health insurance (Thesis). ProQuest   304000122.^{[ page needed ]}
2. "Sandra E. Black". Sandra E. Black.
3. https://www.aeaweb.org/content/file?id=580 An Interview with Marianne Bertrand, 2004 Elaine Bennett Research Award Winner
4. Essays on the Changing Labor Market: Computerization, Inequality, and the Development of the Contingent Work Force: Dissertation Summary Retrieved September 24, 2016.
5. Lawrence Katz Past Ph.D. Students Retrieved 31 December 2018.
6. "Longs's CV".
7. "WolfersCV" (PDF).
8. "Kenneth A. Froot | Official Website" (PDF). scholar.harvard.edu. Retrieved November 16, 2025.
9. "Williams's CV". Archived from the original on February 20, 2019. Retrieved September 25, 2016.
10. "Biographical Sketch". The President and Fellows of Harvard College. Retrieved December 17, 2014.
11. Autor, David; Deming, David (2024), Cord, Robert A. (ed.), "Lawrence F. Katz (1959–)" , The Palgrave Companion to Harvard Economics, Springer International Publishing, pp. 1065–1090, doi:10.1007/978-3-031-52053-2_43, ISBN   978-3-031-52053-2
12. Bevir, M.; Trentmann, F. (October 28, 2002). Critiques of Capital in Modern Britain and America: Transatlantic Exchanges 1800 to the Present Day. Springer. ISBN   978-0-230-50572-8.
13. Kampeas, Ron (October 9, 2023). "Economics Nobel awarded to Claudia Goldin for work on women in the labor market".
14. Jonas, Michael (November 3, 2011). "Learning curve". CommonWealth magazine. No. Fall 2011/American Dream Special Issue. Archived from the original on July 30, 2014. Retrieved December 17, 2014.
15. Kotkin, Stephen (October 5, 2008). "Minding the Inequality Gap". New York Times.
16. Daron Acemoğlu; David Autor (June 2012). "What Does Human Capital Do? A Review of Goldin and Katz's The Race between Education and Technology". Journal of Economic Literature . 50 (2): 426–463. doi:10.1257/jel.50.2.426. hdl: 1721.1/73913 . S2CID   1160680. Archived from the original on December 22, 2014. Retrieved December 17, 2014.
17. Goldin, Claudia Dale; Katz, Lawrence F. (2009). The Race between Education and Technology. Harvard University Press. ISBN   978-0674035300.
18. States, United; Committee, United States Congress Joint Economic (1993). High-wage Jobs in a Competitive Global Economy: Hearing Before the Joint Economic Committee, Congress of the United States, One Hundred Second Congress, Second Session, September 16, 1992. U.S. Government Printing Office. ISBN   978-0-16-043229-3.
19. "Moving to Opportunity (Re-broadcast) | Econofact Chats". econofact.org. August 11, 2024. Retrieved April 24, 2025.