James Heckman

James Heckman, born April 19, 1944, in Chicago, is an American economist who won the Nobel Prize. He holds the Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professorship in Economics at the University of Chicago, with additional appointments as a professor in the college, at the Harris School of Public Policy, and at the Law School. He directs the Center for the Economics of Human Development (CEHD) and co-directs the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity (HCEO) Global Working Group. He is also a senior research fellow at the American Bar Foundation and a research associate at the NBER. Heckman received the John Bates Clark Medal in 1983 and shared the 2000 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Daniel McFadden. His reputation rests on foundational work in econometrics and microeconomics.

Heckman is best known for developing the Heckman correction, a method to address selection bias and self-selection in quantitative social science, which earned him the Nobel. His empirical research in labor economics and his studies on the effectiveness of early childhood education are also widely recognized. As of June 2024, RePEc ranked him the third-most influential economist globally.

Heckman earned a B.A. in mathematics from Colorado College in 1965 and a Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University in 1971, with a dissertation on labor supply and goods demand supervised by Stanley W. Black. He began his career as an assistant professor at Columbia University before moving to the University of Chicago in 1973. He has advised over 70 doctoral students, including Carolyn Heinrich, George Borjas, Stephen Cameron, Mark Rosenzweig, and Russ Roberts.

Beyond his primary roles, Heckman has held visiting positions, including Distinguished Chair of Microeconometrics at University College London (2004–2008), professor of Science and Society at University College Dublin (2005–2014), and Alfred Cowles Distinguished Visiting Professor at Yale University (2008–2011). He currently serves as Presidential Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Southern California’s Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics (2015–) and as an International Research Fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies (2014–).

Heckman founded and directs the CEHD at the University of Chicago, which oversees initiatives such as the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Global Working Group, the Pritzker Consortium on Early Childhood Development, the Heckman Equation, the Research Network on the Determinants of Life Course Capabilities and Outcomes, and the Asian Family in Transition Initiative.

His research focuses on developing a scientific basis for economic policy evaluation, emphasizing individual and group heterogeneity, diversity, and unobserved counterfactuals. He created new econometric tools to address these issues. His findings have informed policy on education, job training, labor market equilibrium, anti-discrimination law, and civil rights. He demonstrated a strong causal effect of the 1964 Civil Rights Act on African-American economic progress and recently showed that the US high school dropout rate is rising. He has studied labor market sorting, the ineffectiveness of active labor programs, and returns to education.

More recently, Heckman has examined inequality, human development, and lifecycle skill formation, with a focus on early childhood education. He conducts new social experiments on early childhood interventions and reanalyzes older ones. He also studies the emergence of an underclass in the US and Western Europe. Notably, he found that a high IQ improves financial success chances by only 1–2%, while traits like conscientiousness, diligence, perseverance, and self-discipline are far more important. In the early 1990s, his research on GED certificate outcomes gained national attention.

Heckman has published over 300 articles and several books, including *Inequality in America: What Role for Human Capital Policy?* (with Alan Krueger); *Evaluating Human Capital Policy, Law, and Employment: Lessons from Latin America and the Caribbean* (with Carmen Pages); and volumes 5, 6A, and 6B of the *Handbook of Econometrics* (edited with Edward Leamer).