Tue, Oct 10, 2023 page1

• US’ Claudia Goldin awarded Nobel Prize in Economics

  • AFP, STOCKHOLM
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  The Nobel Prize in Economics was yesterday awarded to US economist Claudia Goldin for research that has helped understand the role of women in the labor market.

  The 77-year-old Harvard professor, who is the third woman to be awarded the prestigious economics prize, was given the nod “for having advanced our understanding of women’s labor market outcomes,” the jury said.

  Goldin said the prize was “important,” but there are “still large” gender inequalities on the labor market.

  

  Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences permanent secretary Hans Ellegren, center, announces the Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Claudia Goldin at a news conference in Stockholm yesterday.

  Photo: Reuters

  By studying the history of women in the US workforce, Goldin has demonstrated several factors that have historically influenced, and in some cases still influence, the supply and demand for women in the labor force, the jury said.

  “She has demonstrated that the sources of the gender gap change over time,” Nobel committee member Randi Hjalmarsson told a news conference.

  Hjalmarsson said that while Goldin had not studied policy, her work had provided an “underlying foundation” that had different policy implications in different places around the world.

  Globally, about 50 percent of women participate in the labor market compared with 80 percent of men, but women earn less and are less likely to reach the top of the career ladder, the prize committee said.

  The Nobel Prize in Economics has the fewest number of female laureates, with just two others since it was first awarded in 1969 — Elinor Ostrom in 2009 and Esther Duflo in 2019 — and Goldin is the first woman to receive the prize as the sole laureate.

  Goldin has “trawled the archives and collected over 200 years of data from the US,” the jury said.

  “She studied something that many people, many historians, for instance, simply decided not to study before because they didn’t think these data existed,” Hjalmarsson said in an interview, calling Goldin “a detective.”

  Among other things, Goldin’s research showed that female participation in the labor force had not always followed an upward trend and instead followed a “U-shaped curve” as the participation actually decreased with the transition from an agrarian to industrial society.

  Participation then started to increase in the early 20th century with the growth of the service sector, with Goldin explaining the trends as the result of both “structural change and evolving social norms.”

  The jury also said that despite modernization — coupled with economic growth and a rising proportion of women in the labor market — the earnings gap between men and women hardly closed for a long time.

  “According to Goldin, part of the explanation is that educational decisions, which impact a lifetime of career opportunities, are made at a relatively young age,” the jury said.

  While much of the earnings gap historically could be explained by differences in education and occupational choices, Goldin “has shown that the bulk of this earnings difference is now between men and women in the same occupation, and that it largely arises with the birth of the first child.”

  Goldin’s work also demonstrated that access to the contraceptive pill played an important role in accelerating the increase in education levels during the 20th century, the committee said.
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