Tuesday 19 March 2019

Alan Krueger, 1960-2019

I was very saddened to hear the news that Alan Krueger passed away over the weekend. The New York Time has a good article summarising his work. Krueger was one of the world's top labour economists, and possibly most famous for his early work on the minimum wage with David Card, which used data comparing fast food workers in Pennsylvania and New Jersey and showed that New Jersey's minimum wage increase had no impact on employment. He also worked on the economics of education and on inequality, and was chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisors for President Obama.

In less policy-oriented work, he wrote (with Marie Connolly) about the economics of popular music, in the appropriately-named paper Rockonomics (ungated earlier versions here and here), which I blogged about here in 2017 (a post that drew comment from the author himself on Twitter!). He also wrote a book, What Makes a Terrorist, which I've been meaning to read and which, sadly, seems very relevant in New Zealand this week.

Unfortunately, you can add Alan to the (growing) list of top economists who passed away before they could claim a deserved future Nobel Prize (probably shared with David Card).

[HT: Marginal Revolution]

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