Speakers

Keynote Speaker

Francine Blau
Francine D. Blau is Frances Perkins Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Labor Economics at Cornell University and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. Before coming to Cornell, she was for many years on the faculty at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Blau
is currently President of the Society of Labor Economics and has served as Chair of the American Economic Association Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession. She is a fellow of the Society of Labor Economics and of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and 2001 recipient of the Carolyn Shaw Bell Award from the American Economic Association Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession for furthering the status of women in the economics profession. Blau has written extensively on gender issues, wage inequality, and international comparisons of labor market outcomes. She is the author of Equal Pay in the Office and, with Lawrence Kahn, of At Home and Abroad: U.S. Labor Market Performance in International Perspective. She is also coauthor, with Marianne Ferber and Anne Winkler, of The Economics of Women, Men, and Work, currently in its 5th edition. She is a graduate of Cornell University and received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University.

Speakers

Susan Mayer
Susan E. Mayer is a professor and dean of the Harris School. She has published numerous articles and book chapters on the measurement of poverty, the effect of growing up in poor neighborhoods, and the effect of parental income on children's well-being. Recent articles include, "How Did the Increase in Economic Inequality between 1970 and 1990 Affect Children's Educational Attainment?" (American Journal of Sociology), and "How Economic Segregation Affects Children's Educational Attainment" (Social Forces). She is currently doing research on intergenerational economic mobility having just published "Has the Intergenerational Transmission of Economic Status Changed" (Journal of Human Resources) among other papers on this topic, and the social and political consequences of the increase in economic inequality in the United States.

Mayer is a member of the Board of Directors of Chapin Hall Center for Children, the General Accounting Office Educators' Advisory Panel. She is a member of two National Academy of Science committees- the Committee on National Statistics Panel to Review U.S. Department of Agriculture's Measurement of Food Insecurity and Hunger, and the Committee on Standards of Evidence and the Quality of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research. Mayer is the past director and deputy director of the Northwestern University/University of Chicago Joint Center for Poverty Research. She has served as an associate editor for the American Journal of Sociology.

Todd Zoellick
Todd Zoellick is the U.S. Department of Education Deputy Secretary's Regional Representative for Region V, which encompasses Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin and is headquartered in Chicago. Since his appointment by President George W. Bush in November 2005, he has visited more than a hundred schools throughout all six states to meet with students, teachers, parents and administrators, celebrate their achievements, and explain federal education policies. Zoellick has also delivered speeches to many education, business and civic organizations, and met with elected officials in each of the six states. In addition to promoting understanding and outreach of U.S. Department of Education programs, Region V has been responsible for assisting students and school districts affected by hurricanes Katrina and Rita through matching their needs with items donated by schools, families and organizations. Prior to joining the Department of Education, Zoellick was an attorney with the public accounting firm of Grant Thornton LLP, specializing in state and local taxes. He also formerly worked for the Illinois Department of Revenue in its litigation division. Zoellick has a B.A. degree, cum laude, from Illinois Wesleyan University and earned a law degree from Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago-Kent College of Law.

Authors

Tom Dee
Thomas S. Dee is an associate professor in the Department of Economics at Swarthmore College and Director of the College's Program in Public Policy. Dee is also a faculty research fellow with the programs on health, education and children at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and, during
2006-2007, is a visiting scholar at Stanford University's School of Education. His research focuses largely on policy-relevant issues in the economics of education and health. Recent projects include econometric evaluations of the racial and gender interactions between students and teachers and an assessment of the effects of graduated driver licensing on teen traffic fatalities.

Claudia Goldin
Claudia Goldin is the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University. She is also the Director of Development of the American Economy Program and Research Associate at the National Bureaus of Economic Research. She is the recipient of a grant from the Mellon Foundation for a project entitled "Transitions" through the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She also received a grant from Harvard University's President's Fund for a project called "Harvard and Beyond." Goldin is currently a fellow at the National Academy of Sciences, the Society of Labor Economics, the American Society of Arts and Sciences, and the Econometric Society. Goldin attended Cornell University where she graduated magna cum laude with distinction and earned a B.A. in economics. She received an M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago.

Murat F. Iyigun
Murat Iyigun is an Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Colorado, Boulder, a Research Fellow at the Center for International Development at Harvard University, and a Network Faculty Member at Sabanci University, Istanbul, Turkey. His main research interests lie in the areas of the
economics of the family, development economics and demography. He received his Ph.D. in economics from Brown University in 1995. Prior to joining the University of Colorado, he was a staff economist at the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, DC. Professor Iyigun has published in journals such as the Review of Economic Studies, International Economic Review, Economic Journal, European Economic Review, American Economic Review, Journal of Population Economics, and the Journal of Development Economics.

Brian Jacob
Brian A. Jacob is a Visiting Associate Professor at the Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. His primary fields of interest are labor economics, program evaluation, and the economics of education. His current research focuses on urban school reform with a particular emphasis on standards and accountability initiatives. In other recent work, he has examined the effect of school choice and high-stakes testing on student achievement, the incidence of teacher cheating within educational accountability systems, the relationship between school and juvenile delinquency, and the impact of public housing demolitions on educational opportunities for children. Jacob is affiliated with the Kennedy School's A. Alfred Taubman Center for State and Local Government and Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy and is a Faculty Research Fellow in the Program on Children and the Program on Education at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He previously served as a policy analyst in the New York City Mayor's Office and taught middle school in East Harlem. He received a B.A. from Harvard University in 1992 and a Ph.D. in public policy from the University of Chicago's Harris School.

Larry Katz
Lawrence Katz is Professor of Economics at Harvard University and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. His research focuses on issues in the general areas of labor economics and the economics of social problems and has examined a wide range of topics including wage and income inequality; unemployment; theories of wage determination; the economics of education; the impact of globalization and technological change on the labor market; the economics of social interactions and neighborhood effects; the economic effects of the birth control pill; and the evaluation of the effectiveness of social and labor market policies. He is the author of numerous articles in scholarly journals on these topics. Katz's recent research explores the patterns and determinants of recent changes in the U.S. wage structure and rising labor market inequality in a historical and international comparative context. He is currently examining the history of economic inequality in the United States and the roles of technological changes and the pace of educational advance in affecting the wage structure. He is also studying the impacts of neighborhood poverty on the socioeconomic and health outcomes of low-income families through the evaluation of the Moving to Opportunity program, a randomized mobility experiment providing housing vouchers to families residing in high-poverty, inner-city public housing projects.

Bridget Long
Bridget Long is an Associate Professor of Education and Economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Using the theory and methods of economics, Long studies the transition from secondary to higher education and beyond. Her work has focused on college access and choice, factors that influence college student outcomes, and the behavior of postsecondary institutions. Several of her research papers examine the enrollment and distributional effects of financial aid programs. She has also examined the effectiveness of postsecondary remediation and the impact of class size and faculty characteristics on student persistence. Current projects include a study on the impact of aid simplification on college access, analysis of the impact of student loans, and research on the role of academic preparation in college outcomes. Long received her Ph.D. and M.A. from the Harvard University Department of Economics and her A.B. from Princeton University. She is a faculty research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and was a visiting scholar with the New England Public Policy Center at the Boston Federal Reserve Bank. She received the National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship and has been awarded numerous research grants from organizations including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Lumina Foundation for Education, and the Ford Foundation.

Jens Ludwig
Jens Ludwig is Professor of Public Policy at Georgetown University, a faculty research fellow of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He is also a member of the editorial boards of Criminology, the Journal of Quantitative Criminology, and the
Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. He has served as the Andrew Mellon Visiting Fellow in Economic Studies at the Brookings Institution, a visiting scholar to the Northwestern University / University of Chicago Joint Center for Poverty Research, a visiting professor at the University of Chicago Law School, and is an elected member of the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management's (APPAM) policy council (board of directors). His research on schooling and children's issues includes a study of the long-term effects of Head Start on participating children with UC-Davis economist Douglas Miller, published in February 2007 by the quarterly Journal of Economics, as well as a number of papers that examine the effects of growing up in disadvantaged urban areas drawing on data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's Moving to Opportunity (MTO) experiment. He is also currently working on a study of family income effects on children's schooling outcomes with Brian Jacob.

Ofer Malamud
Ofer Malamud is an assistant professor at the Harris School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago. He primarily conducts research in the fields of labor economics and economics of education. His recent work focuses on the labor market outcomes associated with general and specific
education. In particular, he has examined the relative returns to general and vocational education in Romania and the tradeoff between early specialization and the gains from delaying the choice of a major field of study in Britain. He has also studied the effect of education on regional mobility using the unintended effect of college-going to avoid the Vietnam draft. Malamud received his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University in 2004, where he also graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. in economics and philosophy. Malamud was previously a research assistant at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Spencer Foundation Dissertation Fellow during 2003-2004.

Diane Schanzenbach
Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach is an assistant professor at the Harris School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago. She is a labor economist with research interests in poverty policy and the economics of education. Her current research focuses on the interaction between schooling
and student health. In recent work, she has studied the effect of the Federal school lunch program on childhood obesity, on food stamps' impact on household consumption. In addition, she has studied the effect of class size reductions in the early grades on students' long-term outcomes. Schanzenbach is affiliated with the Center on Human Potential and Public Policy and the Population Research Center and at the University of Chicago. From 2002 to 2004, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Scholars in Health Policy Research Program at the University of California at Berkeley. She graduated magna cum laude from Wellesley College in 1995 with a B.A. in economics and religion, and received a Ph.D. in economics in 2002 from Princeton University. She served on the President's Council of Economic Advisers in 1996-1997.

Discussants

Lisa Barrow
Lisa Barrow is an economist in the economic research department at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. She conducts research on issues in education, public finance and labor economics. Barrow's research on school choice, the earned income tax credit and the return-to-work decisions of new mothers
has appeared in numerous journals including the National Tax Journal, the Journal of Public Economics and Economic Perspectives, the Chicago Fed's quarterly research publication. Since joining the Chicago Fed in 1998, Barrow has also been a visiting assistant professor at the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University and a visiting lecturer at the Irving B. Harris School of Public Policy Studies at the University of Chicago. Prior to joining the Chicago Fed, she was a lecturer at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. She received a B.A. in economics from Carleton College and A.M. and Ph.D. degrees in economics from Princeton University.

Elizabeth U. Cascio
Elizabeth U. Cascio is an assistant professor of economics at Dartmouth College. Her primary research interest is in the role of schools and the family in development of human capital during childhood. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and the University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research. She is also a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). Cascio received her Ph.D. in Economics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2003. She was an assistant professor at the University of California, Davis for three years before joining the faculty at Dartmouth College in July 2006.

Kerwin Charles
Kerwin Charles's research focuses on a range of subjects in the broad area of empirical labor economics. His work has examined the effect of abortion legalization on outcomes for children born around the time of legalization; how the racial composition of neighborhoods affects the social connections people make; causes for the dramatic convergence in completed schooling between recent generations of American men and women; the effect of retirement on subjective well being; how wealth is propagated across generations within a family; and many dimensions of the effect of health shocks, including the effect on family stability and labor supply. In ongoing work, he is studying how beliefs, opinions, and expectations determine outcomes in the labor market and elsewhere.

Susan M. Dynarski
Susan Dynarski, Associate Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University, studies and teaches the economics of education and tax policy. She has a special interest in the interaction of inequality and education. She has been a faculty research fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research since 1999 and a visiting fellow at Princeton University. Dynarski has studied the impact of grants and loans on college attendance; the impact of state policy on college completion rates; and the distributional aspects of college savings incentives. Her current research focuses on the effect of academic preparation on college success, gender gaps in education outcomes and simplification of the federal student aid system. She has testified on her research to the United States Senate and the President's Commission on Tax Reform. She attended Harvard University (A.B. in social studies and Master's in public policy) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Ph.D. in economics).

Derek Neal
Derek Neal is a Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Virginia. He began his academic career at the University of Chicago in 1991. From 1998 to 2001, he served on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin before returning to Chicago. His current research focuses on measuring black-white labor market inequality and its causes. In related work, he is trying to understand the determinants of the black-white skill gap among young persons as well as black-white differences in family structure. His recent work explores why black-white skill gaps stopped closing during the 1990s and why black children in large cities have fared so poorly in terms of their achievement during the past two decades or more. Neal directs the Chicago Workshop on Black-White Inequality. Beginning in 2006, the workshop has held bi-annual conferences that explore various aspects on black-white inequality and why relative progress for blacks in the United States stopped in many respects during the past two decades. In late 2006, he began work with Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach on a project to evaluate what can be learned about the likely effects of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) from individual data on high-stakes testing outcomes in Chicago Public schools. He has served as an advisory editor for Economics Letters and as a co-editor for the Journal of Human Resources. He now serves as the Editor-in-Chief for the Journal of Labor Economics.

Stephen Raudenbush
Stephen W. Raudenbush is the Lewis-Sebring Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology and founding Chair of the Committee on Education at the University of Chicago. He is interested in conceptualizing and measuring the social organization of neighborhoods, schools, and classrooms and studying their impact on youth. Evaluation of the reliability and validity of assessments of these social settings borrows from and extends tools from psychometrics, as explained in recent articles in Science, Sociological Methodology, and the American Journal of Sociology. Raudenbush has co-authored a series of articles in Psychological Methods on the design of multilevel and longitudinal experiments. His work on causal inference in multilevel settings has recently been published in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis and in the Journal of the American Statistical Association. His book with Anthony S. Bryk, Hierarchical Linear Models: 2nd Edition (2002), provides an authoritative account of analytic methods for multilevel data.