SOLE Prize for Contributions to Data & Measurement

2025 Recipient

Julia Lane

Julia Lane is the 2025 recipient of the SOLE Prize for Contributions to Data and Measurement. Julia is Professor Emerita at the NYU Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. She is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Statistical Association, the International Statistical Institute, the National Academy of Public Administration, and the New Zealand Association of Economists. She was the recipient of the 2014 Roger Herriot Award for Innovation in Federal Statistics and the 2014 Julius Shiskin Memorial Award for Economic Statistics, both awarded jointly by the American Statistical Association, the National Association for Business Economics, and the Washington Statistical Society. She also received the LEHD Founders Award from the U.S. Bureau of the Census, along with John Abowd, Nancy Gordon, and John Haltiwanger.

Julia’s visionary contributions to data and measurement involve building new data sets fundamental to research in economics and other fields; making these and other confidential micro data more accessible to researchers; establishing training programs to better equip analysts to use the data effectively; and analyzing these data herself. The resulting data infrastructure underpins the work of federal and state civil servants; of business economists; and of academics studying topics as varied as labor markets, industrial organization, and scientific innovation; and even of emergency managers. In addition, Julia has published numerous research articles on topics such as employment volatility and worker flows, workforce training, immigration, wage inequality and low-wage work, productivity, the science and engineering workforce, and the economic impact of federal science and engineering funding.

Julia’s role in developing the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics (LEHD) program is one of her signature achievements. While merging employer and household data had long been a goal of the Census Bureau’s, Julia played an integral role in initiating the effort and, ultimately, in bringing the LEHD to fruition. Julia initially had the idea of using federal tax records as the basis for the LEHD. Undeterred by the eventual failure of this plan, Julia conceived of using state unemployment insurance records instead. Because states collect and control access to these administrative records, however, states had to be convinced to share their data. Julia steered the painstaking process of working on a state-by-state basis with staff from Labor Market Offices to use LEHD data to design indicators that were useful for running state programs. With these data products in hand, state staff were able to persuade their superiors to contribute their unemployment insurance data to the new federal program. Expanding the program so that it covered most of the nation was a major achievement of her effort, which spanned seven years from 1997-2004.

The LEHD data are now used for research in academics, business, and federal, state and local government. Not least, the Census Bureau uses the LEHD for its OnTheMap Emergency Management tool, with the LEHD allowing emergency response planners to know both where people live and where they work.

Another major achievement of Julia’s was the co-founding of the Coleridge Initiative in 2018 to establish the Administrative Research Data Facility, a platform on which several federal agencies and 24 states share and link longitudinal data. Researchers and analysts working with these data can access them remotely, thus removing a significant barrier to their use. As CEO of Coleridge, Julia established the Applied Data Analytics training program, a symbiotic, pioneering program that, in collaboration with universities and other institutions, has taught over 1,000 federal, state and local analysts. Data are useful only in combination with skilled analysis, and this initiative has improved government policymaking and efficiency by providing both.

From 2008 to 2012, Julia was also the driving force behind a dataset of great importance for understanding the determinants of U.S. economic growth: STAR METRICS (Science and Technology for America's Reinvestment: Measuring the EffecT of Research on Innovation, Competitiveness and Science). Inspired by Jack Marburger, the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, Julia forged a partnership between U.S. federal science agencies and research institutions to document the return on investment, research impact, and social outcomes of federally funded research and development. Universities establish accounts to which all payments on federally funded projects are logged, and it is these records that form STAR METRICS. Julia subsequently co-founded the Institute for Research on Innovation and Science to house the successor UMETRICS data at the University of Michigan. UMETRICS has been accessed by over 500 users and has yielded publications in such journals as Nature, Science, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Journal of Labor Economics.

Julia’s other data accomplishments include, from 2005-2008, establishing the Remote Access Data Enclave at the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) and, since 2016, the development of the Democratizing Data Search and Discovery Platform. The Remote Access Data Enclave allows users from the private and public sectors to access sensitive business data remotely and currently has about 1,000 institutional users. The services of the Democratizing Data platform allow agencies to track how their data are being used in publications on specific topics over time.

Awarding Julia Lane the 2025 SOLE Prize for Contributions to Data and Measurement is a fitting recognition of her expansion of the nation’s economic, demographic, and business data and of her success in widening researchers’ access to confidential micro data.