Joseph G. Altonji is the Thomas DeWitt Cuyler Professor of Economics at Yale University and a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research. He received a BA and MA degrees in Economics from Yale in 1975 and his Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton University 1981. He previously held faculty positions at Columbia and Northwestern and served as a visiting professor at Princeton and Harvard. He is an elected fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an elected fellow and past president of the Society of Labor Economists and a past president of the Eastern Economic Association. He received the IZA Prize in Labor Economics in 2018.
Altonji specializes in labor economics and applied econometrics. His interests include labor market fluctuations, labor supply, consumption behavior, the economics of education, economic links among family members, race and gender in the labor market, wage determination, and econometric methods. His current research focuses on the role of families and schools in inequality, dynamic models of earnings, marriage, and family income, the effects of undergraduate field of study and graduate field of study on labor major outcomes, the costs of college majors, long term trends in the gender gap in the earnings of college graduates, and the use of selection on observed variables to address selection on unobserved variables.
Altonji has served as a consultant to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago and on a number of advisory panels, including the NAS/NRC Committee on National Statistics, the NAS/NRC Panel on Measuring Discrimination, and the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology STEM Undergraduate Education Working Group and the NSF Social, Behavior and Economic Sciences Advisory Committee. He is a member of the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee.
