Jacob Mincer Award 2024 Recipient

Janet Curry

Committee: Joseph Altonji (chair), David Green, Laura Giuliano, Claudia Olivetti, Uta Schӧnberg, Lowell Taylor and Bruce Weinberg

The Society of Labor Economists awards the 2024 Jacob Mincer Award for lifetime contributions to the field of labor economics to Janet Currie. She is currently the Henry Putnam Professor of Economics and Public Affairs at Princeton University. Previously, she was the Sami Mnaymneh Professor of Economics at Columbia University, Professor of Economics at UCLA, and an Assistant Professor at MIT and UCLA. Janet received her BA and MA in Economics from the University of Toronto, and her PhD from Princeton in 1988.
For Janet, the Mincer Award is the latest in a long list of recognitions that include the 2023 Klaus J. Jacobs Research Award, the Noomis Foundation Distinguished Scientist Award, and honorary doctorates from the University of Zurich and l’Université Jean Moulin Lyon III. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, and the Society of Labor Economists.

For more than three decades, Janet has pioneered research on the role of education, family background, social transfer programs, access to health care, and environmental factors in shaping the health and wellbeing of children and their outcomes as adults. She was a prime mover in making the study of the fetal period and child development an essential concern of labor economics. This pioneering work had a major influence on other fields, including the economics of education, health economics, public economics, and environmental economics.
In the early 1990s, Janet started a research agenda on the effectiveness of early childhood education. Her 1995 AER and 2000 JHR papers with Duncan Thomas and her 2002 AER paper with Eliana Graces and Duncan Thomas on the Head Start program established the importance of family background, alternative education options, and complementarities with later school quality in shaping the short- and long-term benefits from the program.

She has pioneering work on the effects of social insurance on children. Her 1993 AER paper with Nancy Cole is one the first to study the effect of income transfers on birth outcomes. Her 1996 QJE paper and her 1996 JPE paper with Jonathan Gruber are seminal contributions concerning the costs and benefits for child outcomes of expansion of Medicaid coverage. The JPE paper, which focuses on the effects of Medicaid expansion on prenatal care and birth outcomes, introduced a new “simulated instruments” approach to exploiting variation in eligibility rules across states. It is now a standard approach in quasi-experimental studies.
Janet has influential work on the effects of family characteristics on the early and long run outcomes of children. For example, with Enrico Moretti, she found the data necessary to use variation in mother's education associated with college openings to identify the intergenerational transmission of human capital (QJE, 2003). The paper is one of many in which Janet combines novel data with a novel identification strategy.

She is also responsible for the growing literature in economics on the effects on children of environmental factors such as air pollution, water quality, and exposure to lead. Key contributions include her 2005 QJE paper with Matthew Neidell on the link between air pollution and infant health and her co-authored 2009 RESTAT paper on the effects of pollution on school absences. Others include her 2009 AEJ:Applied Economics paper (with Reed Walker) that uses variation associated with elimination of highway toll booths to study the effects of air pollution on infant health, and her 2017 Science Advances paper with M. Greenstone and Kathryn Meckel on the effects of hydraulic fracturing on infant health.

With W. Bentley MacLeod, Janet has done pioneering work on the performance and decision making of doctors. Particularly noteworthy is their 2017 JOLE paper. That paper separately measures the importance of diagnostic skill and surgical skill for birth outcomes. In the context of adolescent mental health, their 2020 Econometrica paper uses novel theory and great data to study how the tradeoff between following drug treatment guidelines and experimentation depends on a physician’s diagnostic skill.
Janet’s research contributions extend far beyond the papers mentioned above. And her contributions extend far beyond her own research. Few can match Janet’s record as a PhD advisor and or as a generous mentor of junior scholars. She has served the economics profession and society in many capacities. She was the first director of the National Bureau of Economic Research’s Program on Children and continues to serve as co-director. This program has had a large influence on the direction of research in labor economics and applied microeconomics. She is currently President of the American Economic Association. She is a past President of the Society of Labor Economists, the Society of Health Economists, and the Western Economic Association. She has served on several National Academy of Sciences committees and panels. She has also been heavily involved in the improvement of data quality and access, serving on the NAS Committee on National Statistics, as an advisor to Statistics Canada, and in other advisory roles. A past winner of the Carolyn Shaw Bell award, Janet has done as much as anyone to increase the presence of women in the economics profession.

Janet Currie’s outstanding scholarship, mentoring, and service make her a truly deserving recipient of the Jacob Mincer Award.