James heckmann

James Heckman (April 19, 1944) is an American economist and professor at the University of Chicago.

Biography

He was awarded the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, together with Daniel McFadden, in 2000 for his pioneering work in econometrics and microeconomics.

Heckman began his career at Colorado College in the United States. In 1971 he received his Ph.D. from Princeton University and worked as a professor at Columbia University before going to the University of Chicago.

His work does not refer only to economics, but has also meant a great contribution to other disciplines in the social field.

Heckman is famous for introducing the concept of "selection bias" in modern econometrics. Reading has always been complex, but the main idea is quite simple. Economists routinely take data on wages to calculate the averages. Many individuals are unemployed (unemployed), and should have missing wages. Before Heckman, economists would simply discard all the records with the missing wages and then calculate averages using the remaining observations. Heckman showed that this process can lead to selection bias because the observations do not have randomly missing wages. For example, poorer individuals in a group tend to be unemployed more often, so average wages may be too high for this group. Thus, Heckman's work has persuaded economists to treat observations more carefully.