Jacob Mincer Award 2025 Recipient

John Bound

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

The Society of Labor Economists awards the 2025 Jacob Mincer Award for lifetime contributions to the field of labor economics to John Bound. 

John Bound has made fundamental contributions to labor economics across many substantive areas including inequality, Black-white income gaps, education, and disability. His work is distinguished by great methodological diversity focusing on measurement, documenting new facts about the world, as well as the estimation of structural models. Two characteristics of John's thinking are evident in all his work: First, he endeavors to use economic models to understand the data, and second, he is deeply skeptical and takes nothing for granted.

John played a pivotal role in the literature on changes in the wage structure change in the 1980s, providing evidence implicating skill-biased technical change (Bound and Johnson, 1992; Berman, Bound, and Griliches, 1994, and Berman, Bound, and Machin, 1998).

Over the years, he has also played a pivotal role in the disability literature. He pioneered the idea of using unsuccessful applicants as a control group for successful applicants in order to study the labor supply effects of disability insurance (Bound, 1989). This approach, which anticipates the use of “judge” instruments, is still in use. His work on the interpretation of survey responses (Bound, 1991) has had a huge impact on the disability literature, as has his work on the implications of changes in the generosity of disability benefits (Bound, Cullen, Nichols, & Schmidt, 2004). Some of his work on disability is summarized in "Economic Analysis of Transfer Programs Targeted on Persons with Disabilities" (Handbook of Labor Economics, 1999).

His work on mobility, both within the United States and internationally, shows that it is key to understanding higher education trends (e.g., Bound, Groen, Kezdi, and Turner (2004), Bound, Braga, Golden, and Khanna (2015), Bound, Braga, Khanna, and Turner (2021)). John also documented increases in the time to a baccalaureate degree (Bound, Lovenheim, and Turner (2010)), which subsequently reversed. Some of this work on the determinants of college education appear in his chapter in the Handbook of the Economics of Education, "Dropouts and Diplomas: The Divergence in Collegiate Outcomes" (2011).

In work with Arline Geronimus, he has studied Black-white differences in health. This work supports the idea that the stressful lives of Black people in the United States cause them to age more quickly than white people (e.g., Geronimus, Hicken, Keene, and Bound (2006)). This finding provides an important perspective on gaps in the situations of Blacks and Whites in the labor market.

In terms of methods, he is perhaps most famous for his early contributions to the literature on weak instruments (Bound, Baker and Jaeger, 1995). But he has made other thoughtful and influential contributions to methods including his work on measurement error (Bound and Krueger 1991, "Measurement Error in Survey Data" (Handbook of Econometrics, 2001), and going beyond the Oaxaca-Blinder-Kitagawa decomposition to understand the Black-white wealth gap (Barsky, Bound, Charles and Lupton, 2002).

In summary, John Bound's contributions have enriched academic discourse and provided valuable policy insights. John has been an exceptionally dedicated doctoral advisor. Many of his students have had distinguished careers in research, teaching, and public service. His research continues to shape our understanding of labor markets, education, and disability policy. He has profoundly influenced the field of labor economics with his pragmatic approach to observing, measuring, and analyzing the social factors that influence the labor market.

Hence, he is richly deserving of the Jacob Mincer Award for Lifetime Contributions to the Field of Labor Economics.