Once again, the Nobel Prize in Economics rewards work carried out in the United States. This year, this prestigious award was awarded to American professor Claudia Goldin, Hans Ellegren, secretary general of the Swedish Academy of Sciences, announced this Monday at noon. She becomes the third woman to receive this distinction, after the American Elinor Ostrom, in 2009, and the French Esther Duflo, in 2019.
Born in 1946 in New York, the septuagenarian obtained a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago in 1972. She taught in several renowned establishments, such as the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton and the University of Wisconsin, before becoming the first woman full professor of economics at Harvard, in 1990.
Throughout her career, Claudia Goldin’s work includes: “the female workforce, the gender income gap, income inequality, technological change, education and immigration », specifies his current employer, Harvard University. Awarded numerous times, she is also the author of several works, including Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women (1990), or, more recently, Career and Family (2021). In this opus, she strives to follow the evolution from the beginning of the 20th century to today of women’s participation in the labor market in the United States, and the changing complexity, generation after generation, of relationship between career and family.
For the Nobel committee, the teacher “advanced our understanding of the situation of women in the labor market”. Relying on a titanic research effort by going through “more than 200 years of data in the United States”, the teacher managed to “demonstrate how and why the differences between the sexes in terms of income and employment rates. “jobs have changed over time,” the experts point out. She “provided the first comprehensive account of women’s earnings and labor force participation across the centuries,” and her research “reaches far beyond the borders of the United States.” “The fact that women’s choices have often been and remain limited by marriage and responsibility for the home and family is at the heart of its analyzes and its explanatory models,” notes the committee, welcoming work which allows “a better understanding of the labor markets of yesterday, today and tomorrow. The American also demonstrated the role of the “contraceptive pill” in increasing the level of education of women, a “revolutionary change” accelerated thanks to this medical device, by “offering new opportunities for career planning”.
The name of Claudia Goldin was regularly mentioned for this distinction. The researcher is renowned for her work on the evolution of women in the labor market, wage gaps between men and women, and the value of education in economic matters. She is one of the most renowned economists in the United States. She has held several institutional roles, including as president of the American Economic Association from 2013 to 2014. She is still director of a department of the National Bureau of Economic Research. “It is in the tradition of Gary Becker, with the modeling of individual choices under constraint, but above all it will give historical depth to the understanding of behavior,” detailed researcher Dominique Meurs in a recent article.
Last year, the Nobel Prize was awarded to three Americans: Ben Bernanke, Douglas Diamond and Philip Dybvig. The winners – a former president of the Fed and two economists – were rewarded for their work on the role of banking establishments during crises. These have “significantly improved our understanding of the role of banks in our economy, particularly during financial crises, as well as how to regulate financial markets,” welcomed the committee.
Earlier, in 2021, the prize recognized the work of three economists, David Card, Joshua D. Angrist and Guido W. Imbens. Their work had “brought new ideas to the labor market and shown what conclusions can be drawn from natural experiments in terms of causes and consequences”, underlined the jury.
This latest prize closes the 2023 Nobel season. Last week, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Iranian activist Narges Mohammadi, saluting “her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and for the promotion of human rights and freedom for all”. A few hours earlier, the literature prize had been awarded to Norwegian Jon Fosse.
