James Heckman

Heckman in 1979 married sociologist Lynne Pettler-Heckman, who died July 8, 2017. They had two children: a son, Jonathan (b. 1982) who is a physicist at the University of Pennsylvania, and a daughter, Alma (b. 1986), who is an assistant professor of history at the University of California at Santa Cruz.

Founded in 2014 and directed by Heckman, the Center for the Economics of Human Development (CEHD), at the University of Chicago, umbrellas his multiple research areas and initiatives that encompass rigorous empirical research to determine effective human capital policies and program design. CEHD initiatives include 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. Along with professor Steve Durlauf, Heckman is the Co-Director of the HCEO Working Group.

In addition to serving as the Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor and director of the Economics Research Center in the department of economics, Heckman is also a professor of law at the Law School and a professor at the Harris School of Public Policy, where he is director of both the Center for Social Program Evaluation and Center for the Study of Childhood Development. He also serves as a member of the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics's Research Council. Heckman has held many appointments at other institutions and notably served as the Distinguished Chair of Microeconometrics at University College London (2004-2008), a Professor of Science and Society at University College Dublin (2005-2014), and as the Alfred Cowles Distinguished Visiting Professor at Yale University (2008-2011). His current appointments include Presidential Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Southern California's Leonard D. Schaeffer Center for Health Policy and Economics (2015-) and International Research Fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies (2014-).

In the early 1990s, his pioneering research, on the outcomes of people who obtain the GED certificate, received national attention.

Heckman has received numerous awards for his work, including the John Bates Clark Medal of the American Economic Association in 1983, the 2005 and 2007 Dennis Aigner Award for Applied Econometrics from the Journal of Econometrics, the 2005 Jacob Mincer Award for Lifetime Achievement in Labor Economics, the 2005 Ulysses Medal from the University College Dublin, the 2007 Theodore W. Schultz Award from the American Agricultural Economics Association, the Gold Medal of the President of the Italian Republic awarded by the International Scientific Committee of the Pio Manzú Centre in 2008, the Distinguished Contributions to Public Policy for Children Award from the Society for Research in Child Development in 2009, the 2014 Frisch Medal from the Econometric Society, the 2014 Spirit of Erikson Award from the Erikson Institute, and the 2016 Dan David Prize for Combating Poverty.

He served as an assistant professor at Columbia University before he moved to the University of Chicago, in 1973. He has been a dissertation advisor for over 70 students, including Carolyn Heinrich, George Borjas, Stephen Cameron, Mark Rosenzweig, and Russ Roberts.

Heckman was born to John Jacob Heckman and Bernice Irene Medley in Chicago, Illinois. He received his B.A. in mathematics from Colorado College in 1965 and his Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University in 1971 after completing a doctoral dissertation titled "Three essays on the supply of labor and the demand for goods" under the supervision of Stanley W. Black.

His work has been devoted to the development of a scientific basis for economic policy evaluation, with special emphasis on models of individuals and disaggregated groups, and the problems and possibilities created by heterogeneity, diversity, and unobserved counterfactual states. He developed a body of new econometric tools that address these issues. His research has given policymakers important new insights into areas such as education, jobtraining, the importance of accounting for general equilibrium in the analysis of labor markets, anti-discrimination law, and civil rights. He demonstrated a strong causal effect of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in promoting African-American economic progress. He has recently demonstrated that the high school dropout rate is increasing in the US. He has studied the economic benefits of sorting in the labor market, the ineffectiveness of active labor market programs, and the economic returns to education.

James Joseph Heckman (born April 19, 1944) is a Nobel Prize-winning American economist at the University of Chicago, where he is The Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor in Economics and the College; Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy; Director of the Center for the Economics of Human Development (CEHD); and Co-Director of Human Capital and Economic Opportunity (HCEO) Global Working Group. He is also Professor of Law at the Law School, a senior research fellow at the American Bar Foundation, and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. In 2000, Heckman shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Daniel McFadden, for his pioneering work in econometrics and microeconomics. As of December 2020, according to RePEc, he is the second-most influential economist in the world.