Nobel Prize for Claudia Goldin

I was very excited to read that Claudia Goldin (Harvard University) was awarded the 2023 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (aka the Nobel Prize in Economics) on Monday, "for having advanced our understanding of women’s labour market outcomes". There are several reasons I was excited. First, it is welcome and well-deserved recognition for another female economist (only the third to win the Nobel Prize, and the first to win it alone). Second, although David Card won the award a couple of years ago, I still feel that labour economics has been under-represented among Nobel Prize winners, and many of Goldin's contributions have been in labour economics. Third, and most importantly (to me, at least), I've been routinely picking Goldin as a Nobel winner (jointly with Larry Katz) in the Waikato Economics Discussion Group annual poll for the last several years (and this is proof that a stopped clock will eventually be right).

The Nobel Committee's summary of Goldin's work focuses very much on her work on gender, but I see her contributions as much broader than that. In particular, I have greatly appreciated her work on education and inequality, as beautifully captured in her book with Katz, The Race between Education and Technology (which I reviewed here). That book, along with the broader research, was one of the contributing sources to the topic on inequality and social security in my ECONS102 class, which we covered this week.

Having said that, the work on gender has been particularly important to economics, and it is no wonder that the Nobel Committee focuses on that. Along with Goldin's research on female work and labour market outcomes, she also established the Undergraduate Women in Economics (UWE) Challenge, as a way of addressing the gender gap in economics. As I have noted before (most recently here, and in the links at the end of that post), the gender gap remains a serious problem. Goldin has also mentored or otherwise supported many researchers investigating the gender gap, including the authors of many papers that I have written about on this blog. The impact of this work is likely to have a long-run positive effect on the economics profession, and for Goldin's contributions in this space, we can be very thankful.

On The Conversation, Leonora Risse (RMIT University) wrote a great summary of Goldin's contributions to economics. Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution points to a number of video sources on Goldin and her work. The Financial Times has an excellent write-up (paywalled), as does the New York Times (also possibly paywalled). This was a well-deserved award, and in my view overdue. Oh, and a fourth reason to be excited: Goldin's latest NBER Working Paper, published on the morning of the Nobel Prize announcement, is titled "Why Women Won". Very fitting.