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Michael Lovenheim

Professor

Michael Lovenheim is a Professor of Economics in the Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy and the ILR School as well as a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Senior Fellow (adjunct) at the Hoover Institution. His research areas are labor economics, public finance, and the economics of education, with a particular focus on the interplay between education systems and the labor market.

Recent education papers examine the effect of state higher education funding on long-run educational and financial outcomes, the effect of college major choices on student earnings, how college major choices affect gender and racial earnings inequality, the labor market returns to college coursework, the productivity of for-profit colleges, and the impact of teachers unions on school districts and students. Non-education projects include a series of papers on how housing wealth affects key household investment decisions, such as collegiate attainment, fertility, child health, healthcare spending, and wealth transmission across generations, understanding the relationship between worker skills and labor market power, and how the skill content of private sector union coverage has changed over time. In 2017, he co-authored (with Sarah Turner) the first comprehensive textbook on the Economics of Education.

Lovenheim received his PhD in Economics from the University of Michigan in 2007 and joined Cornell in 2009 after two years as a Searle Freedom Trust Post-doctoral Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. From 2018-2023 he served as the Donald C. Opatrny ’74 Chair of the Department of Economics at Cornell. He currently is a co-editor at the Journal of Human Resources and is the inaugural Director of the Cornell Center for Education Policy and Workforce Development. The Center studies policies that align the skills taught to students and workers with the skills needed in the labor market by building partnerships with state governments to expand data infrastructure and conduct research on policies of high priority to state policymakers.