Claudia Dale Goldin (born May 14, 1946) is an American economic historian and labor economist. She is the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University. In October 2023, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics (officially called the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel), "for having advanced our understanding of women's labor market outcomes,” as well as the root causes of the gender pay gap. She was the third woman to win the award, and the first woman to win the award solo.
She is a co-director of the National Bureau of Economic Research's (NBER) Gender in the Economy Study Group and was the director of the NBER's Development of the American Economy program from 1989 to 2017. Goldin's research covers a wide range of topics, including the female labor force, the gender gap in earnings, income inequality, technological change, education, and immigration. Most of her research interprets the present through the lens of the past and explores the origins of current issues of concern. Her most recent book, Career & Family: Women's Century-Long Journey toward Equity (Princeton University Press), was released on October 5, 2021. Her contribution to studying women's work and labor market outcomes is evidenced in its impact on the fields of economics and economic history, including the study of women's role in economic development.
Goldin was the president of the American Economic Association in the 2013–14 academic year. In 1990, she became the first woman to be given a tenured professorship in Harvard's economics department.
Biography
Early life and education
Claudia Goldin was born into a Jewish family in New York City in 1946, and grew up in Parkchester in the Bronx. Her father Leon Goldin (1918—2011) worked as a data processing manager at Burlington Industries, and her mother Lucille Rosansky Goldin (1919—2020) was the principal of Public School 105 in the Bronx. As a child, Claudia was determined to become an archaeologist, but upon reading Paul de Kruif's The Microbe Hunters (1927) in junior high school, she became drawn to bacteriology. As a high school junior, she completed a summer school course in microbiology at Cornell University and after graduating from the Bronx High School of Science she entered Cornell University with the intention of studying microbiology.
In her sophomore year, Goldin took a class with Alfred Kahn, "whose utter delight in using economics to uncover hidden truths did for economics what Paul de Kruif's stories had done for microbiology." She became fascinated by regulation and industrial organization, the topics that interested Kahn, and she wrote her senior thesis on the regulation of communications satellites. After earning her B.A. in economics from Cornell, Goldin entered the PhD program in economics at the University of Chicago with the intention of studying industrial organization. She began her doctoral program in that field, but after Gary Becker came to Chicago she added labor economics and then gravitated to economic history with Robert W. Fogel as her advisor. She wrote her PhD dissertation on slavery in United States antebellum cities and in southern industry. She received a PhD in industrial organization and labor economics from the University of Chicago in 1972.
Career
After graduate school, Goldin was an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She moved to Princeton University in 1973 and to the University of Pennsylvania in 1979, where she became a tenured full professor. She joined the economics department at Harvard University in 1990, where she was the first woman to be offered tenure in that department.
Goldin was the president of the American Economic Association in 2013/14 and the president of the Economic History Association in 1999/2000. She has been elected fellow of numerous organizations, including the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the Society of Labor Economists, the Econometric Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a member of sections 53 (Social and Political Sciences) and 54 (Economic Sciences) of the National Academy of Sciences. She has received several honorary doctorates including the University of Nebraska system, Lund University, the European University Institute, the University of Zurich, Dartmouth College, and the University of Rochester. She was an editor of the Journal of Economic History, from 1984 to 1988.
For 28 years ending in 2017, Goldin was the director of the Development of the American Economy (DAE) Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).