John Maron Abowd (born December 22, 1951) is the Associate director for research and methodology and chief scientist of the

US Census Bureau The United States Census Bureau (USCB), officially the Bureau of the Census, is a principal agency of the U.S. Federal Statistical System, responsible for producing data about the American people and economy. The Census Bureau is part of the ...

, where he serves on leave from his position as the

Edmund Ezra Day Edmund Ezra Day (December 7, 1883 – March 23, 1951) was an American educator. Day received his undergraduate and master's degrees from Dartmouth College and his doctorate in economics from Harvard. While at Dartmouth, he became a brother ...

Professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who pr ...

Economics Economics () is the social science that studies the Production (economics), production, distribution (economics), distribution, and Consumption (economics), consumption of goods and services. Economics focuses on the behaviour and intera ...

, professor of

information science Information science (also known as information studies) is an academic field which is primarily concerned with analysis, collection, Categorization, classification, manipulation, storage, information retrieval, retrieval, movement, dissemin ...

, and member of the Department of

Statistical Science ''Statistical Science'' is a review journal published by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. The founding editor was Morris H. DeGroot, who explained the mission of the journal in his 1986 editorial: "A central purpose of ''Statistical Sci ...

Cornell University Cornell University is a private statutory land-grant research university based in Ithaca, New York. It is a member of the Ivy League. Founded in 1865 by Ezra Cornell and Andrew Dickson White, Cornell was founded with the intention to teach an ...

. At Cornell, Abowd has taught and conducted research since 1987, including seven years on the faculty of the

Johnson Graduate School of Management The Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management is the Graduate school, graduate business school in the SC Johnson College of Business at Cornell University, a private university, private Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New Yor ...

.Short Biography of John M. Abowd
/ref> Abowd is best known for his contributions in the field of labor economics, and in particular his work in creating, disseminating, and using longitudinal employee-employer matched data.

Career

Abowd received a BA in economics (with highest honors) from the

University of Notre Dame The University of Notre Dame du Lac, known simply as Notre Dame ( ) or ND, is a private Catholic research university in Notre Dame, Indiana, outside the city of South Bend. French priest Edward Sorin founded the school in 1842. The main campu ...

in 1973 and a

PhD PHD or PhD may refer to: * Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), an academic qualification Entertainment * '' PhD: Phantasy Degree'', a Korean comic series * ''Piled Higher and Deeper'', a web comic * Ph.D. (band), a 1980s British group ** Ph.D. (Ph.D. albu ...

in economics from the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...

in 1977, under supervision of Arnold Zellner. Prior to arriving at Cornell University in 1987, Abowd served on the faculty at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private research university in Princeton, New Jersey. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial Colleges, fourth-oldest ins ...

, the University of Chicago, and the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

. In addition to his professorship at Cornell University, Abowd is currently a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a research affiliate at the Centre de Recherche en Economie et Statistique (CREST), and a research fellow at the

Institute for the Study of Labor The IZA - Institute of Labor Economics (german: Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit), until 2016 referred to as the Institute of the Study of Labor (IZA), is a private, independent economic research institute and academic network focused o ...

(IZA). Abowd is also the director of the Labor Dynamics Institute (LDI) at Cornell. Abowd is the 2014 president of the Society of Labor Economists. He was chair in 2013 for the Business and Economic Statistics Section and fellow of the American Statistical Association. He is an elected member of the

International Statistical Institute The International Statistical Institute (ISI) is a professional association of statisticians. It was founded in 1885, although there had been international statistical congresses since 1853. The institute has about 4,000 elected members from gov ...

(2012). Abowd served as a distinguished senior research fellow at the

United States Census Bureau The United States Census Bureau (USCB), officially the Bureau of the Census, is a principal agency of the U.S. Federal Statistical System, responsible for producing data about the American people and economy. The Census Bureau is part of the ...

from 1998 to 2012. He also served on the National Academies' Committee on National Statistics from 2010 to 2013 and as director of the Cornell Institute for Social and Economic Research (CISER) from 1999 to 2007. Abowd has been the

principal investigator In many countries, the term principal investigator (PI) refers to the holder of an independent grant and the lead researcher for the grant project, usually in the sciences, such as a laboratory study or a clinical trial. The phrase is also often us ...

or co-principal investigator for multiyear grants and contracts from the

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National I ...

, the U.S. Census Bureau, and the

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is an American philanthropic nonprofit organization. It was established in 1934 by Alfred P. Sloan Jr., then-president and chief executive officer of General Motors. The Sloan Foundation makes grants to support or ...

. Abowd, along with

John Haltiwanger John Couch Haltiwanger (born December 12, 1955) is the Dudley and Louisa Dillard Professor of Economics and Distinguished University Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland-College Park. He is best known for his work developing and ...

and

Julia Lane Julia Ingrid Lane is an economist and economic statistician who works as a professor at New York University's Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, as well as NYU's Center for Urban Science and Progress, helping CUSP to build CUSP data facili ...

, received the 2014 Roger Herriot Award from the American Statistical Association for work improving federal data collection, and in particular work developing and disseminating employee-employer matched data through the Census Bureau's LEHD Program.

Current research

Abowd's current research focuses on the creation, dissemination, privacy protection, and use of matched longitudinal data on employers and employees. Abowd helped to found and continues to provide scientific leadership for the U.S. Census Bureau's Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics Program, which integrates censuses, demographic surveys, economic surveys, and administrative data to produce research and public-use data. Abowd's other research interests include network models for integrated labor market data; statistical methods for confidentiality protection of

microdata Microdata can mean: * Microdata (statistics), a statistical term for individual response data in surveys and censuses * Microdata (HTML), a specification for semantic markup in HTML * Microdata Corporation Microdata Corporation was an American ...

, including the creation of

synthetic data Synthetic data is information that's artificially generated rather than produced by real-world events. Typically created using algorithms, synthetic data can be deployed to validate mathematical models and to train machine learning models. Data g ...

; international comparisons of labor market outcomes; executive compensation;

bargaining In the social sciences, bargaining or haggling is a type of negotiation in which the buyer and seller of a good or service debate the price or nature of a transaction. If the bargaining produces agreement on terms, the transaction takes plac ...

and other wage-setting institutions; and the econometric tools of labor market analysis.

Major contributions to economics

Abowd has published a large number of articles on a variety of subjects in labor economics. His work has appeared in the ''

American Economic Review The ''American Economic Review'' is a monthly peer-reviewed academic journal published by the American Economic Association. First published in 1911, it is considered one of the most prestigious and highly distinguished journals in the field of ec ...

'', ''

Econometrica ''Econometrica'' is a peer-reviewed academic journal of economics, publishing articles in many areas of economics, especially econometrics. It is published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the Econometric Society. The current editor-in-chief is Gui ...

'', the ''

Review of Economics and Statistics ''The'' ''Review of Economics and Statistics'' is a peer-reviewed 103-year-old general journal that focuses on applied economics, with specific relevance to the scope of quantitative economics. The ''Review'', edited at the Harvard University’s K ...

'', the ''

Quarterly Journal of Economics ''The Quarterly Journal of Economics'' is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the Oxford University Press for the Harvard University Department of Economics. Its current editors-in-chief are Robert J. Barro, Lawrence F. Katz, Nathan N ...

'', the '' Journal of the American Statistical Association'', the '' Journal of Business and Economic Statistics'', the '' Journal of Econometrics'', and other major economics and statistics journals. Among Abowd's most influential articles was "High Wage Workers and High Wage Firms", in which Abowd,

Francis Kramarz Francis Kramarz (born March 8, 1958) is a French economist who works as Professor at the École Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Économique (ENSAE), where he has been directing the Center for Research in Economics and Statistics ...

, and David Margolis used a matched sample of French employees and employers to decompose annual compensation into components related to observable employee characteristics, personal heterogeneity, firm heterogeneity, and residual variation. Their econometric approach, now widely referred to as the "AKM decomposition," laid the groundwork for a large body of subsequent research using employee-employer linked data in labor economics to understand topics including inter-industry wage differentials, firm size-wage effects, and job search and matching in the labor market. In other widely cited work with David Card, Abowd used

longitudinal data In statistics and econometrics, panel data and longitudinal data are both multi-dimensional data involving measurements over time. Panel data is a subset of longitudinal data where observations are for the same subjects each time. Time series and ...

to analyze changes in individual earnings and hours over time. Abowd and Card explored the

covariance In probability theory and statistics, covariance is a measure of the joint variability of two random variables. If the greater values of one variable mainly correspond with the greater values of the other variable, and the same holds for the les ...

structure of earnings and hours and interpreted them in the context of a life-cycle model of

labor supply In mainstream economic theories, the labour supply is the total hours (adjusted for intensity of effort) that workers wish to work at a given real wage rate. It is frequently represented graphically by a labour supply curve, which shows hypotheti ...

. Abowd also has written extensively on executive compensation, and in particular on whether performance-based compensation affects corporate performance.Abowd, John. (1990) "Does Performance-Based Managerial Compensation Affect Corporate Performance?" ''

Industrial and Labor Relations Review ''Industrial and Labor Relations Review'' (ILR Review) is a publication of the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations. It is an interdisciplinary journal publishing original research on all aspects of industrial relations. The ...

'' 43(3): 52S-73S.

References

External links

*
John M. Abowd's personal website

John M. Abowd's Cornell University website

John M. Abowd's National Bureau of Economic Research website

John M. Abowd's IZA website
*

{{DEFAULTSORT:Abowd, John M 1951 births 21st-century American economists 20th-century American economists Cornell University faculty Labor economists Living people University of Chicago alumni Notre Dame College of Arts and Letters alumni Fellows of the Econometric Society Fellows of the American Statistical Association National Bureau of Economic Research