Thomas Lemieux (born August 10, 1962) is a Canadian economist and professor at the University of British Columbia.
Lemieux belongs to the world's foremost labour economists in terms of research output, in particular on wage inequality.
Education
Lemieux was born in Quebec City, Quebec. He received his B.A. in economics from Université Laval in 1984 and his M.A. in economics from Queen's University the following year. In 1989, he received his Ph.D. from Princeton University.
Later life and career
After receiving his Ph.D, he taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology until 1992. In 1992, he was named an assistant professor at the Université de Montréal. In 1999, Lemieux accepted a faculty position at the University of British Columbia. He has been an associate editor at several economics journals, such as the Journal of Business and Economic Statistics, Labour Economics, Journal of the European Economic Association, Review of Economics and Statistics, and American Economic Review.
A good portion of his research centres around the topic of income inequality. Lemieux also studies econometric methods to analyze the income distribution. He is a fellow at the Royal Society of Canada and the Society of Labor Economists. At the University of British Columbia, Lemieux directs the Team for Advanced Research on Globalization, Education, and Technology. Lemieux has published 40 journal articles and two books on labor economics.
Research
Thomas Lemieux's research interests mostly relate to labour economics in general and wage inequality in specific as well as econometric methods to analyze these issues. According to IDEAS/RePEc, Lemieux belongs to the top 1% of most-cited economists. In his research, Lemieux has frequently collaborated with David Card and Nicole Fortin.
Research on wages and wage inequality
The main area of Lemieux's research has been the distribution and dynamics of wages. Studying the rise in wage inequality in the U.S. in the 1980s in a series of studies with John DiNardo and Nicole Fortin, Lemieux repeatedly emphasizes the importance labour market institutions, finding e.g. that about a third of the growth in male and female wage inequality can be attributed to deunionization for men and to the minimum wage for women, with economic deregulation having a comparatively small impact; moreover, the difference between the declines of the unionization rates in Canada and the U.S. are found to account for two-thirds of the growth differential in wage inequality between both. Further work with David Card, Francis Kramarz, John Abowd and David Margolis studied differences between the labour market institutions in the U.S., Canada and France in the 1980s, notably the causes of changes in the relative structure of wages and employment and the effect of the minimum wage on youth employment. Moreover, in studies with Card and Fortin, Lemieux analysed the differentials between genders and racial groups in the U.S., with their findings emphasizing the role of changes in returns to skill and the link between female wage gains and male wage inequality. In further work on unions, Lemieux argues that Canadian unions increase the average wage of workers and compress the returns to skills, and provides a comprehensive comparison of the effect of unionization on wage inequality in the U.S., Canada and UK (together with Card and W. Craig Riddell). In another study with Card, Lemieux suggested that falling supply in highly educated workers may account for the growth in the return to college for younger men in the U.S., UK and Canada. In the 2000s, Lemieux repeatedly highlighted the role of increased returns to postsecondary education and sophisticated institutional explanations (e.g. including performance pay, based on work with Bentley MacLeod and Daniel Parent) for the growth in wage inequality at the top of the wage distribution in the 1980s and 1990s, while arguing against simple models of skill-biased technological change This empirical discussion was accompanied by various models advanced by Lemieux, e.g. - in joint work with Robert Gibbons, Lawrence Katz and Parent - of a model where a worker's skills are imperfectly observable but determine her current wage and sector, high-skill workers concentrate in high-wage sectors, thus earning high returns to their skills (with Robert Gibbons, Lawrence Katz and Daniel Parent).