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Session 27: Youth Human Capital and Economic Growth
Future growth and competitiveness depend directly on current human
capital
development. This session will examine most recent findings.
Presentations
Links of Interest
Early Child Development Research at the FRB of Minneapolis
Speakers
James J. Heckman
Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor of Economics
University of Chicago
James Heckman was born in Chicago in 1944 and educated at Colorado College (B.A. Math, 1965) and Princeton University (Ph.D., Economics, 1971). He is the Henry Schultz Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago where he has served since 1973. He is director of the Economics Research Center at the Department of Economics at the University of Chicago, Director of the Center for Social Program Evaluation at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago, and a Senior Research Fellow at the American Bar Foundation.
Heckman’s work has been devoted to the development of a scientific basis for economic policy evaluation. In the course of this work he has made contributions to economic theory and to econometrics, with special emphasis on models of individuals (or disaggregated groups, such as organizations or firms) and to the problems, and possibilities created by heterogeneity, diversity and unobserved counterfactual states. His work uses data on individuals and firms to test economic theory and it uses economic theory to solve problems in microdata analysis. He has developed the economics and econometrics of lifecycle dynamic models to study unemployment, wage growth and skill formation over the lifecycle. He has developed new tools for analyzing microeconomic data on firms and families. His methods for correcting for biased samples and for constructing policy counterfactuals are widely used. They use economic theory to guide the construction of counterfactual states. He has applied these tools to analyze the impact of civil rights and social action on the economic status of African Americans; to analyze the role of regulation in affecting productivity and employment in many countries around the world; to analyze the determinants and consequences of labor incomes and income inequality, the consequences of tax policy and to develop methods for analyzing the pricing of labor services and the determinants of lifecycle skills.
Some of his recent books include:
Inequality in America: What Role for Human Capital Policy? , J. Heckman and A. Krueger, eds. forthcoming MIT Press, 2003.
Evaluating Human Capital Policy: (The Gorman Lectures) Princeton University Press, 2004.
Law and Employment: Lessons From Latin America and the Caribbean (with C. Pages), forthcoming, University of Chicago Press, 2003.
Incentives in Government Bureaucracies: Can Incentives in Bureaucracies Emulate Market Efficiency? (Brookings, 2004).
Robert Grunewald
Economic Analyst
Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis
Ross Thompson
Professor of Psychology
University of California at Davis
Ross Thompson is Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Davis. His research interests are in two fields. As a developmental psychologist, he studies early parent-child relationships, the development of emotional understanding and emotion regulation, conscience development, and the growth of self-understanding. As a psycholegal scholar, he works on the applications of developmental research to public policy concerns, including the effects of divorce and custody arrangements on children, child maltreatment prevention, school readiness, research ethics, and early brain development and early intervention. Thompson is a founding member of the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child, and was a member of the Committee on Integrating the Science of Early Childhood Development of the National Academy of Sciences that produced the report, From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development (National Academy Press, 2000). He has twice been Associate Editor of Child Development, and is Consulting Editor for a series of topical texts in developmental psychology published by McGraw-Hill. His books include Preventing Child Maltreatment through Social Support: A Critical Analysis (Sage, 1995),(edited with Paul Amato) The Postdivorce Family: Children, Families, and Society (Sage, 1999), and Toward a Child-Centered, Neighborhood-Based Child Protection System (edited with Gary Melton and Mark Small; Praeger, 2002). He also edited Socioemotional Development, based on the 1988 Nebraska Symposium on Motivation (University of Nebraska Press, 1990), and is coauthor of Infant-Mother Attachment (Erlbaum, 1985). He is currently working on Early Brain Development, the Media, and Public Policy (University of Nebraska Press) and Emotional Development (McGraw-Hill). He received his A.B. from Occidental College in 1976, his A.M. from the University of Michigan in 1979, and the Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. Thompson has been a Visiting Scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Education in Berlin, a Senior NIMH Fellow in Law and Psychology at Stanford University, and a Harris Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago. He has received the Boyd McCandless Young Scientist Award for Early Distinguished Achievement from the American Psychological Association, the Scholarship in Teaching Award and the Outstanding Research and Creative Activity Award from the University of Nebraska, where he was also a lifetime member of the Academy of Distinguished Teachers.
