Claudia Goldin

Her father Leon Goldin (1918—2011) worked as a data processing manager at Burlington Industries, and her mother Lucille Rosansky Goldin (1919—2020) was the principal of Public School 105 in the Bronx.

As a child, Claudia was determined to become an archaeologist, but upon reading Paul De Kruif's The Microbe Hunters (1927) in junior high school, she became drawn to bacteriology.

As a high school junior, she completed a summer school course in microbiology at Cornell University and after graduating from the Bronx High School of Science she entered Cornell University with the intention of studying microbiology.

In her sophomore year, Goldin took a class with Alfred Kahn, "whose utter delight in using economics to uncover hidden truths did for economics what Paul De Kruif's stories had done for microbiology."

Claudia Dale Goldin (born May 14, 1946) is an American economic historian and labor economist.

She is the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University.

In October 2023, she was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences "for having advanced our understanding of women's labor market outcomes”. She was the third woman to win the award, and the first woman to win the award solo.

Claudia Goldin was born in the Bronx, New York City on May 14, 1946.

Her family was Jewish.

In 1967 she graduated from Cornell University with a BA in economics, and in 1969 she finished her Master's degree in Economics at the University of Chicago.

From 1971-1973, she was an assistant professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin.

She received a PhD in industrial organization and labor economics from the University of Chicago in 1972.

She wrote her PhD dissertation on slavery in southern antebellum cities.

She was also an assistant professor of economics from 1973-1979, at Princeton University.

Notably, together with the late Frank Lewis, she wrote the groundbreaking piece "The Economic Cost of the American Civil War: Estimates and Implications" (1975).

Also, in 1976 her book Urban Slavery in the American South, 1820 to 1860: A Quantitative History was published.

However, Goldin's historical work on women and the American economy is what she is best known for.

Regarding that subject, her papers that have been most influential have been those about the impact of the contraceptive pill on women's career and marriage decisions, the education of women and men together in higher education, the history of women's pursuit of career and family, women's last names after marriage as a social indicator, the reasons most undergraduates are now women, and the new life history of women's employment.

From 1979-1985 she was an associate professor of economics at the University of Pennsylvania, and from 1985-1990 she was a professor of economics there.

She was an editor of the Journal of Economic History, from 1984 to 1988.

She is a co-director (co-directing with Claudia Olivetti and Jessica Goldberg) of the National Bureau of Economic Research's (NBER) Gender in the Economy study group, and was the director of the NBER's Development of the American Economy program from 1989 to 2017.

Goldin's historical work on women and the American economy is what she is best known for.

Regarding that subject, her papers that have been most influential have been those about the impact of the contraceptive pill on women's career and marriage decisions, the education of women and men together in higher education, the history of women's pursuit of career and family, women's last names after marriage as a social indicator, the reasons most undergraduates are now women, and the new life history of women's employment.

In 1990, Goldin became the first woman to be tenured in Harvard's economics department.

She joined the economics department at Harvard University in 1990, where she was in 1990 the first woman to be given tenure in that department.

Her book Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women (1990) told the story of women's employment in the U.S. from the late eighteenth century to the late twentieth century.

After writing that book on the economic history of the female labor force, Goldin set out to research the history of U.S. education.

She began with a series of articles on the high school movement and the shaping of higher education in the U.S. that culminated in her Economic History Association presidential address, "The Human Capital Century and American Leadership: Virtues of the Past" (2001).

She then worked with Lawrence Katz to understand the history of economic inequality in America and its relationship to educational advances.

Their research produced many papers on the subject and was capped by the publication of The Race between Education and Technology (2008), which argues that the United States became the world's richest nation thanks to its schools.

In 2013 she was the president of the American Economic Association.

Goldin was the president of the American Economic Association in 2013 and the president of the Economic History Association in 1999/2000.

She has been elected fellow of numerous organizations, including the American Academy of Political and Social Science, the Society of Labor Economists, the Econometric Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

She is a member of sections 53 (Social and Political Sciences) and 54 (Economic Sciences) of the National Academy of Sciences.

She has received several honorary doctorates including the University of Nebraska system, Lund University, the European University Institute, the University of Zurich, Dartmouth College, and the University of Rochester.

In 2015, with funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Goldin and Tatyana Avilova initiated the Undergraduate Women in Economics (UWE) Challenge in hopes of shrinking the gender gap among undergraduate majors in economics.

A randomized controlled trial was carried out for one year using twenty institutions to receive the treatment and sixty-eight others as controls to see if light-touch, low-cost interventions could increase the number of female economics majors.

It was found that the treatment "may have been successful at liberal arts colleges and possibly at the larger universities that, in addition, had their own RCT [randomized controlled trial]."

For 28 years ending in 2017, Goldin was the director of the Development of the American Economy (DAE) Program at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).

Goldin wrote regarding the American Civil War and slavery.