Claudia Goldin

Harvard University

Claudia Goldin is the Henry Lee Professor of Economics at Harvard University and, in 2023, became the first woman to win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences as a sole laureate, recognized for advancing understanding of women's labor-market outcomes across two centuries of American economic history. A meticulous economic historian, Goldin assembled and reconstructed long-run datasets — from nineteenth-century manufacturing censuses to twentieth-century cohort earnings records — to show how the gender pay gap evolved alongside marriage norms, contraceptive technology, and the structure of work. Her concept of 'greedy jobs,' occupations that disproportionately reward long and inflexible hours, reframed the remaining wage gap as a problem of temporal flexibility rather than raw discrimination or human-capital differences. She directed the Development of the American Economy program at the National Bureau of Economic Research for decades and served as President of the American Economic Association in 2013. Goldin's books, including 'Understanding the Gender Gap' and 'Career and Family,' are standard references for policymakers and corporate diversity researchers. For organizations selling data, survey instruments, or analytical tooling into academic economics, her lab represents a high-visibility node in empirical labor research with deep ties to NBER's funding and data-sharing ecosystem.