Mincer Award Winners 2008:

Reuben Gronau

Presented by Robert Willis

Reuben Gronau is Professor Emeritus of Economics at Hebrew University of Jerusalem. It is especially fitting for Reuben to win the award with this name in this place, because he received his Ph.D. in 1967 from Columbia, studying under Jacob Mincer and Gary Becker.

During his career he has also spent periods as visiting professor at many leading American universities including Chicago, Columbia, Northwestern, Princeton, MIT, Stanford and UCLA. After the fall of communism, he played a key role in introducing graduate study of Western economics at the New Economic School in Moscow and Charles University in Prague. He has received a number of important honors including Fellow of the Econometric Society, Fellow of the Society of Labor Economists, and President of the Israeli Economic Society. He is also a winner of the Landau Award for research on the economy of Israel in recognition of his service on public committees that have studied the setting of rates for telephones, ports, hospitals, electricity and water as well as studies of taxi cab licensing and mass transit systems.

I first met Reuben in 1970 at the NBER, which was then located in New York City at 37th and Madison, where I was a post-doc doing research on fertility behavior. The NBER in those days was literally a crucible for the foundation of modern labor economics. Many of the best students of Mincer and Becker from Columbia worked at the NBER on dissertations and stayed on afterward as post-docs, visitors or junior faculty in the New York area. In addition to Reuben, they included Mike Grossman, Arleen Leibowitz, Bill and Lisa Landes and Bob Michael among many others. The NBER also attracted young labor economists from elsewhere including Lee Lillard, Jim Heckman, Sherwin Rosen, Jim Smith, Yoram Weiss, and Finis Welch. Ken Wolpin, at CUNY, and Mark Rosenzweig, at Columbia, were graduate students. Even in this distinguished crowd, Reuben was outstanding. His first contribution is contained in a 1970 AER article, "The Effect of Traveling Time on the Demand for Passenger Transportation" that was based on his dissertation and an NBER book. He showed why the demand for air travel was highly income elastic because the relative cost of air travel relative to slower modes tends to decline with the value of time, measured by market wages. To my disappointment as a person from Boeing’s home in Seattle, Reuben also showed why, despite its speed, the supersonic transport would tend to be inefficient because of the fixed time and money costs of getting to and from the airport. To my knowledge, however, Reuben is not responsible for the Seattle Supersonics’ upcoming move to Oklahoma City.

From then until now, Reuben has continued to make path-breaking contributions to theory of the allocation of time, toward developing methods to measure the value of time, and to investigating the implications of the value of time for labor supply, household production and other aspects of household behavior. In the early 1970s, he tackled the problem of measuring the value of housewives’ time, pointing out that non-working women reveal that the shadow price of their time in household production is greater than their market wage when they refrain from working. In a seminal 1974 JPE paper, “Wage Comparisons -- A Selectivity Bias,” he developed a grouped-data method of estimating the value of time for non-working women that was a precursor to Heckman’s papers on selection bias. My own favorite paper of Reuben’s is his 1977 JPE paper, "Leisure, Home Production and Work -- The Theory of the Allocation of Time Revisited." This paper, which I have referred to as “The Gronau Model” to several generations of students, formalizes the trichotomy of leisure, work at home and work in the market by assuming that home-produced goods and market goods are perfect substitutes. An increase in the market wage leads to a reduction of home-produced goods while its effect on leisure and market work is indeterminate. An increase in income increases leisure, reduces market work, and leaves home work unchanged. I have found this model to provide an extremely useful framework in thinking about how the economic functions and behavior of the family vary across levels of economic development ranging from low income agrarian societies to modern service-dominated economies.

When I tried to notify Reuben that he had won the Mincer Award last week, he was nowhere to be found. I would like to thank Yoram and Menucha Weiss for their excellent detective work in finding Reuben in York, England where he was attending the wedding of his son, Ariel, and alerting him to the need to find subsonic transportation to New York. This has been quite a week for Reuben, honoring a lifetime of contribution to both the theory and practice of household production and the allocation of time.

References

“The Effect of Traveling Time on the Demand for Passenger Transportation,” The Journal of Political Economy, 78:2, March/April 1970.
“Information and Frictional Unemployment,” American Economic Review, 61:3, June 1971.
“The Effect of Children on the Housewife's Value of Time,” Journal of Political Economy, 81:2, Part II, March/April 1973.
“The Intrafamily Allocation of Time: The Value of Housewives' Time,” American Economic Review, 63:4, September 1973.
“Wage Comparisons -- A Selectivity Bias,” Journal of Political Economy, 82:6, November/December 1974.
“Leisure, Home Production and Work -- The Theory of the Allocation of Time Revisited,” Journal of Political Economy, 85:6, December 1977

John Pencavel

Presented by Orley Ashenfelter

John Pencavel is the Pauline K. Levin-Robert L. Levin and Pauline C. Levin-Abraham Levin Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences, Stanford University.  He received both an undergraduate degree with first class honors and an M.Sc.degree with distinction in economics at University College, London.  He then crossed the Atlantic to accept the prestigious Jane Eliza Proctor Visiting Fellowship at Princeton University, where he received his Ph.D. in economics.

Pencavel has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a National Fellow of the Hoover Institution, and he has been elected a fellow of the Econometric Society as well as a fellow of his alma mater University College, London.  He was President of the Society of Labor Economists in 2005.

Pencavel’s dissertation research started a lifelong fascination with the study of the nature and determination of the employment relationship.  This research helped provide the basis for both our modern studies of personnel economics and for the now fashionable study of the way morale and job satisfaction affect productivity and life satisfaction.  This work used market outcomes, such as quit rates, to infer worker satisfaction.  Pencavel’s finding that higher wage rates were associated with lower quit rates forms the most credible basis for much of the modern research in this area. His “Wages, Specific Training, and Labor Turnover in U.S. Manufacturing Industries,” published 35 years ago in the International Economic Review remains a model of how economic theory and empirical analysis can be joined.  In subsequent years Pencavel spent a considerable amount of time bringing the same analytical and empirical skills to bear on the complex role that trade unions play in the employment relationship.  His Labor Markets under Trade Unionism: Employment, Wages, and Hours, published in 1991 and awarded the Richard A. Lester Prize for the Outstanding Book in Industrial Relations or Labor Economics published in that year is a fitting and elegant summary of over 20 years of Pencavel’s research on this topic.

It would be oversimplifying matters to focus only on Pencavel’s research on trade unions, labor cooperatives, and the complexities of the employment relationship.  He also played an important role in the analysis of the pioneering Seattle/Denver income maintenance experiments, which were among the earliest randomized field experiments in the area of social policy.  And what student of labor economics is not familiar with his masterful and highly influential survey of labor supply in the first edition of the Handbook of Labor Economics?

John Pencavel has spent his entire academic career at Stanford University, where he has displayed the extraordinary devotion to his obligations that only the English seem to bring to their work.  John has served in Stanford’s faculty senate, as department chair (twice), and on countless committees that govern the University.  For many years he taught in the core microeconomics sequence to graduate students because of his view that “economic theory is far too important to be taught by theorists alone.”

It is especially fitting that John Pencavel receive the Jacob Mincer Career Achievement Award for Lifetime Contributions to the Field of Labor Economics.  His work truly represents a lifetime of accomplishment and it embodies the finest aspirations for using economic analysis to interpret and explain how labor markets work and how they can be improved.

2008 Nominating Committee:

Daron Acemoglu
Orley Ashenfelter
Sandra Black
John Kennan
Kathryn Shaw
Jeffrey Smith
Finis Welch (Chair)
Robert Willis (Ex Officio)

David Wentworth/Columbia University

Reuben Gronau, Flora Mincer, John Pencavel

Mincer Award Winners 2007:

Dale Mortensen

Dale Mortensen is one of the two winners of the 2007 Society of Labor Economists’ Jacob Mincer Award for lifetime contributions to the field of labor economics. Dale, who is currently the Ida Cook Professor of Economics at Northwestern University, has revolutionized the economic analysis of labor markets with his work on search and matching models. He was one of the first economists to develop the tools of search theory. He was later one of the leading figures in showing how these tools can be used for gaining a better empirical understanding of the working of labor markets. His work on search and matching theory has led to a large literature on both empirical and theoretical economics, in labor economics and in macroeconomics, and on both sides of the Atlantic. Dale deserves a very large share of the credit for this phenomenal achievement, though he would be the first to share the credit with others, including Ken Burdett, Peter Diamond and Christopher Pissarides.

A central topic in labor economics is the understanding of the level of employment and unemployment in the economy and their variation over time and across societies.  While it is sometimes useful to think of labor as just another commodity, with wages and employment determined by the usual supply and demand forces, it has long been argued that there is something different about the determination of the labor market.  Although many people have made this observation, Dale was one of the first people to actually do something about it.  Employment relationships involve an important element of matching, where the worker’s skills have to be well-suited to the job, and the employer must find appropriate workers at the right time. In addition, for many jobs, both employers and employees have to make investments for a potentially long-term relationship. Neither these features nor the concept of “unemployment,” which at least  superficially looks like a failure of market clearing, fit easily with the neoclassical labor supply-labor demand framework. Dale has been the key player in the development of a new conceptual framework for thinking about unemployment. This framework maintains the powerful and attractive notions of the neoclassical approach, in its emphasis on microfoundations and equilibrium, but combines it with a modeling of the frictions that are ubiquitous in labor markets.

Dale achieved this starting from models of product market search, first developed by, among others, George Stigler and Brian McCall. These models took the process of searching, including the decision-theoretic aspects of search, seriously. But they were partial equilibrium models, taking the distribution of prices as exogenous. This limited their applicability in labor market analyses. Starting with his seminal 1970 papers “A Theory of Wage in Employment Dynamics” in Phelps’ famous volume, Microeconomic Foundations of Employment in Inflation Theory, and “Job Search, the Duration of Unemployment and the Phillips Curve” in the American Economic Review, Dale developed an approach to labor market frictions and search based on equilibrium. The main idea in these papers was to model the arrival of job opportunities for workers as a stochastic process and use tools from bargaining theory and dynamic programming to make progress on the determination of equilibrium unemployment. He advanced this framework further in a number of papers over the years, including “Unemployment Insurance and Labor Supply Decisions” in Industrial & Labor Relations Review and “Search, Layoffs and Labor Market Equilibrium” in the Journal of Political Economy, written jointly with his former student and long-term collaborator Ken Burdett. These papers have shown how abstract theoretical models relate to functioning of markets in the absence the Walrasian auctioneer can be useful in understanding equilibrium unemployment, wages, layoffs and the effect of unemployment insurance.

At the same time, Dale also contributed to our understanding of externalities created by search frictions in his seminal paper “Property Rights and Efficiency in Meeting, Racing in Related Games” published in the American Economic Review in 1982. This paper showed how search and job acceptance decisions create externalities in frictional markets, because not all commodities/attributes are priced correctly (and also suggested possible ways of remedying these externalities).

This body of work, together with contributions from Ken Burdett, Peter Diamond and Christopher Pissarides, created a coherent and empirically useful framework for the analysis of employment and unemployment. The empirical ramifications and power of this framework became apparent only after micro data showed the rich patterns of job to job flows of workers, separations between firms and workers, and the process of job reallocation among firms, for example, as documented by Steve Davis and John Haltiwanger. Dale Mortensen, together with Christopher Pissarides, wrote “Job Creation and Job Destruction in the Theory of Unemployment” (Review of Economic Studies), which is the seminal article extending the search models to incorporate the rich dynamics of the job reallocation process. This paper has led to an enormous theoretical and empirical literature using search and matching models to analyze employment, wages, worker flows and job flows.

Another significant direction of research in search theory applied to labor markets came from Dale’s collaboration with Ken Burdett, in the form of another seminal paper, “Wage Differentials, Employer Size and Unemployment,” published in International Economic Review. This paper showed how endogenous wage dispersion can arise as a result of search frictions and this type of dispersion can also account for employer size-wage differentials, documented by Brown and Medoff.

Dale is a brilliant theorist. But at every stage of his career, he has been more than a theorist. All of his important contributions have been motivated by important facts and data. His recent work has turned to the structural investigation of wage dispersion among workers using rich micro data sets from Europe. This work led to his recent book, Wage Dispersion: Why Are Similar People Paid Differently? It continues in a series of papers with Rasmus Lentz, developing important links between productivity growth and the reallocation of workers across jobs.

One of Dale’s most striking virtues is his wonderful balance between humility and enthusiasm. His enthusiasm for new ideas and his belief in the power of economics never gets the better of scholarly demeanor and modesty. This combination of modesty and enthusiasm has been crucial for Dale's long journey in transforming the profession’s approach to labor markets.

Dale’s influence is now felt in many different spheres of economics. A large part of current macroeconomics now tries to apply or extend Dale’s work. But Dale is first and foremost a labor economist. His work has been and will continue to be influential in labor economics both in the United States and in Europe, and has been recognized by the IZA Prize in Labor Economics awarded jointly to Dale and Christopher Pissarides in 2005. He is also a fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. We are fortunate to have him as an intellectual leader of the Society of Labor Economists.

Finis Welch

Finis Welch is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Economics at Texas A&M University and Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles. After an undergraduate degree in mathematics and agricultural economics at the University of Houston, Welch received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago in 1966. He directed income distribution research at the National Bureau of Economic Research in New York City during a particularly vibrant period and, subsequently, founded and directed the Labor and Population Studies Program at RAND.

His list of honors includes his selection as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, his selection as the prestigious Richard T. Ely Lecturer of the American Economic Association, and his election as that organization’s Vice-President.

The Jacob Mincer Award is a fitting addition to those honors, as it recognizes Welch’s lifetime of contributions to the entire span of the area of labor economics.  These contributions include his pioneering research on racial differences in economic outcomes as well as his extremely influential work on the distribution of income—fields where his work has had a lasting and profound impact on several generations of students and scholars.  Welch’s contributions also include his mentoring of a long series of highly successful graduate and undergraduate students at the City University of New York, UCLA, and finally at Texas A&M University.  His friendship with, and support of fellow scholars is truly legendary.

Finally, Finis Welch has been a pioneer in the development of the infrastructure of the data and analyses we now use routinely for studies of the labor market.  His development of the software package STATA© (he remains Chairman of the Board of STATA llp) has been a benefit to all, and no doubt was a sound financial investment too.  But Welch has worked on many other projects where the only benefits were to our profession.

We are pleased to salute Finis Welch with the Jacob Mincer Award for a lifetime of achievement in the study of labor economics.

2007 Nominating Committee:

Daron Acemoglu

Orley Ashenfelter

Sandra Black

Hilary Hoynes

John Kennan

Shelly Lundberg, chair

Kathryn Shaw

Click here for a 30-minute video of the 2007 awards ceremony

Mincer Award Winners 2006:

Richard B. Freeman is one of the two winners of the 2006 Society of Labor Economists’ Jacob Mincer prize honoring lifetime achievements in the field of labor economics.  Starting with his PhD thesis, Richard’s work has been both provocative and influential.  In his thesis--at a time when a number of prominent economists were proposing possible explanations for why, in the U.S., the returns to education continued to remain high despite dramatic increases in the educational attainment of the population--Richard documented both a dramatic decline in economic rewards to higher education and the enrollment responses to this decline.  In addition he proposed a simple economic model to rationalize the patterns he observed.  Some argued with the data Richard was presenting; however, Richard’s findings were subsequently confirmed in census data.  Others argued either that students were unaware of the trends or were unmotivated by financial considerations. Richard produced survey evidence showing the opposite.  Finally, others noted that the model of expectations that Richard used in this work was naïve.  While this is true, subsequent work showed the cyclical behavior predicted by Richard’s model would also be characteristic of models that assumed rational expectations on the part of potential students.

Early work of Richard’s on the effect of the government’s intervention in the labor market on the status of Black Americans was also extremely influential.  In a series of papers published in the 1970s Richard argued that the government’s intervention in the labor market during the 1960s had a fundamental effect on the economic status of Black Americans.  Again, this work was controversial. Some argued that the gains would just be temporary and would evaporate during the first recession.   Others argued that the trends were illusory or that they represented secular changes driven by the human capital accumulation.  However, when the progress that had occurred during the 1960s failed to continue into the 1980s, more and more economists began to accept the notion that Richard had been right.

Richard’s own work on labor unions (much of it written with his colleague James Medoff), and the many studies he inspired his students to undertake, blended traditional “institutional” views, a more critical perspective which had become the mainstream orthodoxy, and Hirschman’s concept of “voice”.  Using panel data, he showed that unions did indeed raise wages, holding worker quality constant, and argued that the standard fixed-effect estimates were, if anything, underestimates due to errors in measuring union status.  They also showed that unions increased non-wage compensation (especially health insurance and pensions).  Unions influenced the workplace in other ways, replacing supervisors’ discretion with formal work rules, backed by grievance systems; they gave workers “voice” as an alternative to “exit”, reducing turnover.  He argued that work-rule restrictions that led to egregious inefficiencies were the exception – on balance, unions had a modest effect on productivity, more often positive than negative, but not large enough to offset the effects on compensation.  As employers became more successful in avoiding unionization, he turned his attention to other voice mechanisms for workers such as employee involvement programs.
Beyond the work already mentioned, Richard has worked on a wide range of topics including the job market for scientists and engineers; the effects of immigration and trade on wage inequality; restructuring European welfare states; Chinese labor markets; transitional economies; youth labor market problems; crime; and income distribution and equity in the marketplace. Richard Freeman obtained his PhD from Harvard University under John Dunlop and then, after a short time at Yale, moved to Chicago, where he was greatly influenced by H. Gregg Lewis.  Indeed, one can clearly see both neo-institutional and Chicago school influences in Richard’s work.  Unlike some labor economists today, but like his Chicago teachers, Richard believes in the value of simple economic models.  However, as was true of Dunlop, he also believes that it is important to talk to those whose decisions he is modeling.  In addition, he has been willing to obtain whatever data are needed to answer important questions. Together, these features of Richard’s work, together with his drive to understand what is actually happening in the labor market, have meant that time and time again Richard has been responsible for some of the most basic findings in labor economics. 

In terms of his enthusiasm for new ideas or new findings, Richard reminds one more of a kid in a sandbox than Harvard Professor.  In seminars and public forums he works to find the value rather than the flaws in others’ work.  These traits along with both the quality and the quantity of his work have meant that he has made an enormous contribution to our understanding of how the labor market works.     

This year the Society of Labor Economists presents the Mincer Award to Edward Lazear, for Lifetime Contributions to the Field of Labor Economics.

Over the course of an innovative and prolific career, Lazear has devoted boundless energy to the analysis of labor market behavior: why workers and employers behave as they do, and how they would behave in other circumstances.  In early work, he showed how mandatory retirement rules might arise in competitive labor markets, as a by-product of incentive schemes involving delayed compensation.  In work with Sherwin Rosen, he showed why employers sometimes use tournaments rather than piece rates to motivate workers, in situations where it is difficult to measure effort.  He also analyzed the empirical relationship between employment protection schemes and the employment to population ratio across countries, emphasizing that legislation restricting an employer's freedom to hire at will cannot be taken at face value, since such restrictions might easily be undone by suitably designed employment contracts.

Subsequently Lazear pulled together the new subfield of "personnel economics," noting that many of the themes stressed in his previous work could be developed with a view to designing employment arrangements that induce workers to cooperate effectively in large establishments.

Lazear's infectious enthusiasm for applied economic analysis has had a lasting impact on labor economics, through his own research contributions, and through his support for the work of younger scholars in the field.  His work exemplifies the best traditions of economics, using artfully designed models of rational behavior to look beneath the surface presented by empirical observations.  For example, he recently re-analyzed the confusing mass of empirical findings on the relationship between class sizes and educational attainment, arguing that the gains from smaller classes are masked in the data by an efficiency condition that assigns more disruptive students to smaller classes.

Lazear created the Journal of Labor Economics, and worked tirelessly and selflessly to make it perhaps the most successful field journal in economics, in a remarkably short time.  He also founded the Society of Labor Economists, and used his peerless organizational skills to develop it into a thriving and self-perpetuating institution that is of great benefit to scholars in the field.

Lazear was recently confirmed as chair of the President's Council of Economic Advisors. He began his career at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business, and subsequently moved to Stanford University, where he is the Jack Steele Parker Professor of Human Resources Management and Economics and the Morris Arnold Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution.  He is also an elected fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, and the Society of Labor Economists, and in 2004 he was selected as the third winner of the prestigious IZA Prize in Labor Economics.

2006 Nominating Committee:

Sandra Black
John Bound, Chair
Hilary Hoynes
John Kennan
Shelly Lundberg
Steve Rivkin
John Pencavel

Mincer Award Winners 2005:

Orley Ashenfelter

Orley Ashenfelter is one of the two winners of the 2005 Society of Labor Economists’ Jacob Mincer prize honoring lifetime achievements in the field of labor economics. Over the course of a distinguished career, Orley Ashenfelter has had tremendous influence on the development of modern labor economics. His early work on trade unions brought neoclassical economics to bear on a subject that had been the domain of traditional institutionally-oriented industrial relations specialists. As labor supply emerged as one of the most important subjects in the new field, Ashenfelter showed (in work with James Heckman) that neoclassical theory could be applied to decision making within the family. In his Frisch-prize winning 1980 article, Ashenfelter developed a theoretical and empirical framework for distinguishing between voluntary and involuntary unemployment. Orley was also involved in the income maintenance experiments, the first large-scale social experiments.

In 1972 Orley served as Director of the Office of Evaluation of the U.S. Dept. of Labor and became deeply interested in the problem of program evaluation. This focus led him to emphasize developing credible and transparent sources of identification through strategies such as the collection of new data, difference-in-difference designs, and exploiting “natural experiments.”

In the 1990s, Orley turned to measuring the returns to education. In a series of studies using new data on twins, Ashenfelter (with Alan Kreuger and Cecilia Rouse) suggested that OLS estimates of the returns to schooling were biased downward to a significant degree. Orley has also had a significant impact on the development of empirical law and economics in recent years.

Beyond his personal contributions, Orley has had a significant impact as a mentor. His students are legion and include many of the leading economists of the next generation.

Orley served the profession as editor of the American Economic Review Review from 1985 to 2001, and as an editor of the Handbook of Labor Economics. He is currently the 1895 Joseph Douglas Green Professor of Economics at Princeton University, and the Editor and co-founder of the American Journal of Law & Economics. He has been honored with a Guggenheim fellowship and with the IZA Prize in Labor Economics and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Econometric Society.

James J. Heckman

James Heckman is one of the winners of the 2005 Society of Labor Economists’ Jacob Mincer prize for lifetime achievement in the field of Labor Economics. Heckman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2000, together with Daniel McFadden. The Nobel committee cited Heckman’s pathbreaking work on the selection problem, which is arguably the most important impediment to causal inference in social science. Heckman’s analysis of selection problems in microeconometric research has had profound implications for applied research in economics.

Heckman’s work on selection, and on the creation of plausible policy counterfactions, has had a profound impact on labor economics and on microeconomics more generally. He has applied these tools to understanding the economics progress of African-Americans, lifecycle labor supply, the evaluation of training programs, lifecycle human capital accumulation, the regulation of labor markets, and income inequality, among other topics. His work on program evaluation is extremely influential. He is a prolific author with over 200 published papers and many books.

Some of his recent books include: Inequality in America: What Role for Human Capital Policy? (with Alan Krueger), 2003; Evaluating Human Capital Policy (the Gorman Lectures), 2004; and Law and Employment: Lessons from Latin American and the Caribbean (with C. Pages), 2003. It is especially approprate for Heckman to win the Mincer prize since he began his academic career at Columbia and credits Jacob Mincer and Finis Welch with being the “guiding lights of a brilliant empirical environment.”

James Heckman is currently the Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago, the Director of the Economics Research Center and of the Center for Social Program Evaluation at the University of Chicago, and a Senior Research Fellow at the American Bar Foundation. He is also a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Statistical Association, and the Econometric Society. He has received many honors including the American Economic Association’s John Bates Clark medal in 1983.

2005 Nominating Committee:

John Bound
Janet Currie, chair
Hank Farber
Audrey Light
Steve Rivkin
Finis Welch
Bob Willis

History of the Mincer Award:

On October 1, 2003, the SOLE membership voted 128-15 to ratify the following amendment to the Bylaws:

3. The Career Achievement Award for Lifetime Contributions to the Field of Labor Economics

To acknowledge a lifetime of contributions to the field of labor economics. There will be two (2) awards per year for the first five (5) years. The issue of numbers of awards and their frequency will be visited by the SOLE Executive Board between the fourth and fifth years of this award.

Election of recipients for the Career and the Rosen awards is by majority vote of the Electoral Board. The Electoral Board consists of all members of SOLE’s Executive Board and all members of the Nominating Committee. The Nominating Committee shall present not more than two nominees for each of the awards to be given. A nomination requires that a quorum of the Nominating Committee participate in the selection and election requires a quorum of the Executive Committee and a quorum of the Nominating Committee. A quorum is a simple majority.

The Nominating Committee consists of six (6) regular members, a chair, and the SOLE president as a non-voting member. The chair is appointed by the SOLE president and serves one (1) year only. Terms of regular members are three (3) years. Each year, the SOLE president appoints two (2) new regular members who will replace two (2) who are rotating off the committee.

Upon enactment of this Amendment, the SOLE president will appoint two (2) regular members to three- (3-) year terms and the immediate past president will appoint two(2) regular members to two- (2-) year terms. The Executive Board will appoint two (2) more to one- (1-) year terms.

The inaugural awards went to Jacob Mincer and Gary S. Becker on April 30, 2004. The award will henceforth be known as the Mincer Award.

2004 Nominating Committee: Larry Katz (chair), John Bound, Janet Currie, Hank Farber, Audrey Light, Steve Rivkin, Robert Willis, Finis Welch (ex-officio).

2004 Executive Board: Orley Ashenfelter, Francine D. Blau, Derek Neal, John Pencavel, Finis Welch.