Thomas Lemieux (born August 10, 1962) is a Canadian
economist
An economist is a professional and practitioner in the social sciences, social science discipline of economics.
The individual may also study, develop, and apply theories and concepts from economics and write about economic policy. Within this ...
and professor at the
University of British Columbia
The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a Public university, public research university with campuses near University of British Columbia Vancouver, Vancouver and University of British Columbia Okanagan, Kelowna, in British Columbia, Canada ...
.
Lemieux belongs to the world's foremost labour economists in terms of research output, in particular on
wage inequality.
Education
Lemieux was born in
Quebec City
Quebec City is the capital city of the Provinces and territories of Canada, Canadian province of Quebec. As of July 2021, the city had a population of 549,459, and the Census Metropolitan Area (including surrounding communities) had a populati ...
,
Quebec
Quebec is Canada's List of Canadian provinces and territories by area, largest province by area. Located in Central Canada, the province shares borders with the provinces of Ontario to the west, Newfoundland and Labrador to the northeast, ...
.
He received his B.A. in economics from
Université Laval
(; English: ''Laval University)'' is a public research university in Quebec City, Quebec, Canada. The university traces its roots to the Séminaire de Québec, founded by François de Montmorency-Laval in 1663, making it the oldest institutio ...
in 1984 and his M.A. in economics from
Queen's University the following year. In 1989, he received his Ph.D. from
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 ...
.
Later life and career
After receiving his Ph.D, he taught at 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 ...
until 1992. In 1992, he was named an assistant professor at the
Université de Montréal
The Université de Montréal (; UdeM; ) is a French-language public research university in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The university's main campus is located in the Côte-des-Neiges neighborhood of Côte-des-Neiges–Notre-Dame-de-Grâce on M ...
. In 1999, Lemieux accepted a faculty position at the
University of British Columbia
The University of British Columbia (UBC) is a Public university, public research university with campuses near University of British Columbia Vancouver, Vancouver and University of British Columbia Okanagan, Kelowna, in British Columbia, Canada ...
. He has been an associate editor at several economics journals, such as the ''
Journal of Business and Economic Statistics'', ''
Labour Economics
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 ...
'', ''
Journal of the European Economic Association
The ''Journal of the European Economic Association'' is a peer-reviewed academic journal covering all aspects of economics. It was established in 2003 and is published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the European Economic Association. The current m ...
'', ''
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 ...
'', and ''
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 ...
''.
A good portion of his research centres around the topic of
income inequality
In economics, income distribution covers how a country's total GDP is distributed amongst its population. Economic theory and economic policy have long seen income and its distribution as a central concern. Unequal distribution of income causes ...
. Lemieux also studies econometric methods to analyze the income distribution. He is a fellow at the
Royal Society of Canada
The Royal Society of Canada (RSC; , SRC), also known as the Academies of Arts, Humanities, and Sciences of Canada (French: ''Académies des arts, des lettres et des sciences du Canada''), is the senior national, bilingual council of distinguishe ...
and the
Society of Labor Economists.
[ At the University of British Columbia, Lemieux directs the Team for Advanced Research on Globalization, Education, and Technology. Lemieux has published 40 journal articles and two books on labor economics.
]
Research
Thomas Lemieux's research interests mostly relate to labour economics in general and wage inequality in specific as well as econometric methods to analyze these issues. According to IDEAS/RePEc
Research Papers in Economics (RePEc) is a collaborative effort of hundreds of volunteers in many countries to enhance the dissemination of research in economics. The heart of the project is a decentralized database of working papers, preprints, ...
, Lemieux belongs to the top 1% of most-cited economists. In his research, Lemieux has frequently collaborated 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 ...
and Nicole Fortin.
Research on wages and wage inequality
The main area of Lemieux's research has been the distribution and dynamics of wages. Studying the rise in wage inequality in the U.S. in the 1980s in a series of studies with John DiNardo and Nicole Fortin, Lemieux repeatedly emphasizes the importance labour market institutions, finding e.g. that about a third of the growth in male and female wage inequality can be attributed to deunionization for men and to the minimum wage for women, with economic deregulation having a comparatively small impact; moreover, the difference between the declines of the unionization rates in Canada
Canada is a country in North America. Its Provinces and territories of Canada, ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, making it the world's List of coun ...
and the U.S. are found to account for two-thirds of the growth differential in wage inequality between both. Further 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 ...
, Francis Kramarz, John Abowd and David Margolis studied differences between the labour market institutions in the U.S., Canada and France
France, officially the French Republic, is a country located primarily in Western Europe. Overseas France, Its overseas regions and territories include French Guiana in South America, Saint Pierre and Miquelon in the Atlantic Ocean#North Atlan ...
in the 1980s, notably the causes of changes in the relative structure of wages and employment and the effect of the minimum wage on youth employment. Moreover, in studies with Card and Fortin, Lemieux analysed the differentials between genders and racial groups in the U.S., with their findings emphasizing the role of changes in returns to skill and the link between female wage gains and male wage inequality. In further work on unions, Lemieux argues that Canadian unions increase the average wage of workers and compress the returns to skills, and provides a comprehensive comparison of the effect of unionization on wage inequality in the U.S., Canada and UK (together with Card and W. Craig Riddell). In another study with Card, Lemieux suggested that falling supply in highly educated workers may account for the growth in the return to college for younger men in the U.S., UK and Canada.
In the 2000s, Lemieux repeatedly highlighted the role of increased returns to postsecondary education and sophisticated institutional explanations (e.g. including performance pay, based on work with Bentley MacLeod and Daniel Parent) for the growth in wage inequality at the top of the wage distribution in the 1980s and 1990s, while arguing against simple models of skill-biased technological change This empirical discussion was accompanied by various models advanced by Lemieux, e.g. - in joint work with Robert Gibbons, Lawrence Katz and Parent - of a model where a worker's skills are imperfectly observable but determine her current wage and sector, high-skill workers concentrate in high-wage sectors, thus earning high returns to their skills (with Robert Gibbons, Lawrence Katz and Daniel Parent).
Research on regression discontinuity and decomposition methods
Lemieux has contributed significantly to the methodological development of applied econometrics. Since the 2000s, he has repeatedly used regression discontinuity designs to analyze various economic issues. For example, in work with David Card that exploits the discontinuity in college enrollment rates due to U.S. high school graduates' attempt of avoiding the draft during the Vietnam War
The Vietnam War (1 November 1955 – 30 April 1975) was an armed conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia fought between North Vietnam (Democratic Republic of Vietnam) and South Vietnam (Republic of Vietnam) and their allies. North Vietnam w ...
, Lemieux estimates that draft avoidance raised college attendance rates by 4-6%. Similarly, in a study with Kevin Milligan that uses the discontinuity in Quebecois social assistance between childless recipients under and above age 30, Lemieux observes that the increase in social assistance benefits reduces employment by disincentivizing work. Publications with Guido Imbens
Guido Wilhelmus Imbens (born 3 September 1963) is a Dutch-American economist whose research concerns econometrics and statistics. He holds the Applied Econometrics Professorship in Economics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business at Stanf ...
and David S. Lee, Lemieux further reviewed the use of regression discontinuity designs in economics and provides guidance for practitioners.
Another key area of Lemieux's work in econometrics are decomposition methods, in particular related to comparisons between wage distributions and the analysis of their dynamics. More recently, together with Sergio Firpo and Nicole Fortin, Lemieux has pioneered the use of ''recentered influence function'' (RIF) ''regressions'', an extension of the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition method which allows to study the impact of changes in the distribution of the explanatory variables on quantiles of the unconditional (marginal) distribution of an outcome variable. While Lemieux, Firpo and Fortin originally used RIF regressions to analyze the polarization of male wages in the U.S. from the 1980s to the mid-2010s, their methodology has been adopted by other organizations, e.g. the ILO
The International Labour Organization (ILO) is a United Nations agency whose mandate is to advance social and economic justice by setting international labour standards. Founded in October 1919 under the League of Nations, it is one of the firs ...
's 2018/19 Global Wage Report. Another important application of RIFs by Lemieux, Firpo and Fortin is the analysis of the contributions of changes in the returns to occupational tasks to changes in the (U.S.) wage distribution, for which they find that wage polarization was driven by STBC and deunionization in the 1980s and 1990s, whereas offshorability of jobs became a major driver in the 1990s. A review by these authors of common decomposition methods used in economics was published in the ''Handbook of Labor Economics''.
Other research
Other major research by Lemieux includes an analysis of the effects of foreign competition on Canadian collective bargaining agreements (with John Abowd), of the effects of taxes on informal labour supply (with Bernard Fortin and Pierre Frechette), on the evolution of work, school and living arrangements among North American youth in the 1970s-90s, on the substitution of alcohol by marijuana due to the increase in the minimum drinking age in several U.S. states, and on dropout and enrollment trends in the U.S. in the postwar period.Card, D., Lemieux, T. (2001). Dropout and enrollment trends in the postwar period: What went wrong in the 1970? In: Gruber, J. (ed.). ''Risky Behavior among Youths: An Economic Analysis''. Chicago: University of Chicago, pp. 439-482.
/ref>
Bibliography
; Books
*Labour Market Economics, 7th Edition (with D. Benjamin, M. Gunderson, and W.C. Riddell), Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 2012.
*Labour Market Economics, 6th Edition (with D. Benjamin, M. Gunderson, and W.C. Riddell), Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 2007.
*Social and Labour Market Aspects of North American Linkages (co-editor with Richard Harris), University of Calgary Press for Industry Canada, 2005.
*L'économie souterraine au Québec: mythes et réalités (with Bernard Fortin, Gaétan Garneau, Guy Lacroix, and Claude Montmarquette), Québec: Presses de l'Université Laval, 1996
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lemieux, Thomas
Canadian economists
1962 births
Fellows of the Royal Society of Canada
Labor economists
Living people
Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty
Princeton University alumni
People from Quebec City
Academic staff of the University of British Columbia
Education economists