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, 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 U.S. Census Bureau is part of the U ...

, 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. Biography Day received his undergraduate and master's degrees from Dartmouth College and his doctorate in economics from Harvard. While at Dartmouth, he became ...

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

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

, professor of information science, 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 university, private Ivy League research university based in Ithaca, New York, United States. The university was co-founded by American philanthropist Ezra Cornell and historian and educator Andrew Dickson W ...

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

Johnson Graduate School of Management The Cornell Johnson Graduate School of Management is the graduate business school of Cornell University, a private Ivy League research university in Ithaca, New York. Established in 1946, Johnson is one of six List of Ivy League business schools ...

.Short Biography of John M. Abowd
/ref> Abowd is best known for his contributions in the field of

labor economics Labour economics seeks to understand the functioning and dynamics of the markets for wage labour. Labour is a commodity that is supplied by labourers, usually in exchange for a wage paid by demanding firms. Because these labourers exist as pa ...

, 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; ; ND) is a Private university, private Catholic research university in Notre Dame, Indiana, United States. Founded in 1842 by members of the Congregation of Holy Cross, a Cathol ...

in 1973 and a

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

in economics from the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, or UChi) is a Private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Its main campus is in the Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, Chic ...

in 1977, under supervision of

Arnold Zellner Arnold Zellner (January 2, 1927 – August 11, 2010) was an American economist and statistician specializing in the fields of Bayesian probability and econometrics. Zellner contributed pioneering work in the field of Bayesian analysis and econome ...

. Prior to arriving at Cornell University in 1987, Abowd served on the faculty at

Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial ...

, the University of Chicago, and the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

. In addition to his professorship at Cornell University, Abowd is currently a research associate at the

National Bureau of Economic Research The National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) is an American private nonprofit research organization "committed to undertaking and disseminating unbiased economic research among public policymakers, business professionals, and the academic co ...

(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 An institute is an organizational body created for a certain purpose. They are often research organisations (research institutes) created to do research on specific topics, or can also be a professional body. In some countries, institutes ca ...

(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 The American Statistical Association (ASA) is the main professional organization for statisticians and related professionals in the United States. It was founded in Boston, Massachusetts, on November 27, 1839, and is the second-oldest continuous ...

. He is an elected member of the

International Statistical Institute The International Statistical Institute (ISI) is a professional association of statisticians. At a meeting of the Jubilee Meeting of the Royal Statistical Society, statisticians met and formed the agreed statues of the International Statistical ...

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

United States Census Bureau The United States Census Bureau, officially the Bureau of the Census, is a principal agency of the Federal statistical system, U.S. federal statistical system, responsible for producing data about the American people and American economy, econ ...

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

National Science Foundation The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) is an Independent agencies of the United States government#Examples of independent agencies, independent agency of the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government that su ...

, 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., president and chief executive officer of General Motors. The Sloan Foundation makes grants to support origina ...

. Abowd, along with John Haltiwanger and Julia Lane, received the 2014 Roger Herriot Award from the

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 Confidentiality involves a set of rules or a promise sometimes executed through confidentiality agreements that limits the access to or places restrictions on the distribution of certain types of information. Legal confidentiality By law, la ...

protection of microdata, including the creation of

synthetic data Synthetic data are 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 generated by a comp ...

; international comparisons of labor market outcomes;

executive compensation Executive compensation is composed of both the Salary, financial compensation (executive pay) and other non-financial benefits received by an Senior management, executive from their employing firm in return for their service. It is typically a mix ...

;

bargaining In the social sciences, bargaining or haggling is a type of negotiation in which the buyer and seller of a Goods and services, good or service debate the price or nature of a Financial transaction, transaction. If the bargaining produces agree ...

and other wage-setting institutions; and the

econometric Econometrics is an application of statistical methods to economic data in order to give empirical content to economic relationships. M. Hashem Pesaran (1987). "Econometrics", '' The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics'', v. 2, p. 8 p. 8� ...

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 first published by the American Economic Association in 1911. The current editor-in-chief is Erzo FP Luttmer, a professor of economics at Dartmouth College. The journal is ...

'', ''

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 ...

'', the ''

Review of Economics and Statistics ''The Review of Economics and Statistics'' is a peer-reviewed academic journal that covers applied economics, with specific relevance to the scope of econometrics. The editors-in-chief are Will Dobbie (Harvard University) and Raymond Fisman (Bost ...

'', 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 ...

'', the ''

Journal of the American Statistical Association The ''Journal of the American Statistical Association'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Taylor & Francis on behalf of the American Statistical Association. It covers work primarily focused on the application of statis ...

'', the ''

Journal of Business and Economic Statistics The ''Journal of Business & Economic Statistics'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed academic journal published by the American Statistical Association. The journal covers a broad range of applied problems in business and economic statistics, including f ...

'', the ''

Journal of Econometrics The ''Journal of Econometrics'' is a monthly peer-reviewed academic journal covering econometrics. It was established in 1973. The editors-in-chief are Michael Jansson (University of California Berkeley) and Aureo de Paula (University College Lon ...

'', 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, 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 Labour economics seeks to understand the functioning and dynamics of the Market (economics), markets for wage labour. Labour (human activity), Labour is a commodity that is supplied by labourers, usually in exchange for a wage paid by demanding ...

. In other widely cited work with

David Card David Edward Card (born 1956) is a Canadian-American labour economist and the Class of 1950 Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has been since 1997. He was awarded half of the 2021 Nobel Memorial Prize in ...

, Abowd used longitudinal data 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. The sign of the covariance, therefore, shows the tendency in the linear relationship between the variables. If greater values of one ...

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

labor supply In Mainstream economics, 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, ...

. 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 American 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