Heckman was born to John Jacob Heckman and Bernice Irene Medley in Chicago, Illinois. He received his B.A. in mathematics from Colorado College in 1965 and his Ph.D. in economics from Princeton University in 1971 after completing a doctoral dissertation titled "Three essays on the supply of labor and the demand for goods" under the supervision of Stanley W. Black.
Founded in 2014 and directed by Heckman, the Center for the Economics of Human Development, at the University of Chicago, umbrellas his multiple research areas and initiatives that encompass rigorous empirical research to determine effective human capital policies and program design. CEHD initiatives include the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Global Working Group, the Pritzker Consortium on Early Childhood Development, the Heckman Equation, the Research Network on the Determinants of Life Course Capabilities and Outcomes, and the Asian Family in Transition Initiative. Along with professor Steve Durlauf, Heckman is the Co-Director of the HCEO Working Group.
Research
Heckman is noted for his contributions to selection bias and self-selection analysis, especially Heckman correction, which earned him the Nobel Prize in Economics. He is also well known for his empirical research in labor economics, particularly regarding the efficacy of early childhood education programs. His work has been devoted to the development of a scientific basis for economic policy evaluation, with special emphasis on models of individuals and disaggregated groups, and the problems and possibilities created by heterogeneity, diversity, and unobserved counterfactual states. He developed a body of new econometric tools that address these issues. His research has given policymakers important new insights into areas such as education, jobtraining, the importance of accounting for general equilibrium in the analysis of labor markets, anti-discrimination law, and civil rights. He demonstrated a strong causal effect of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in promoting African-American economic progress. He has recently demonstrated that the high school dropout rate is increasing in the US. He has studied the economic benefits of sorting in the labor market, the ineffectiveness of active labor market programs, and the economic returns to education. His recent research focuses on inequality, human development and lifecycle skill formation, with a special emphasis on the economics of early childhood education. He is currently conducting new social experiments on early childhood interventions and reanalyzing old experiments. He is also studying the emergence of the underclass in the US and Western Europe. For example, he showed that a high IQ only improved an individual's chances of financial success by 1 or 2%. Instead, "conscientiousness," or "diligence, perseverance and self-discipline," are what lead to financial success. In the early 1990s, his pioneering research, on the outcomes of people who obtain the GED certificate, received national attention. Heckman has published over 300 articles and several books. His books include Inequality in America: What Role for Human Capital Policy? ; Evaluating Human Capital Policy, Law, and Employment: Lessons from Latin America and the Caribbean ; the Handbook of Econometrics, volumes 5, 6A, and 6B ; Global Perspectives on the Rule of Law, ; and The Myth of Achievement Tests: The GED and the Role of Character in American Life. He is currently co-editor of the Journal of Political Economy. He is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, the Society of Labor Economics, the American Statistical Association, and the International Statistical Institute.
Heckman is married to sociologist Lynne Pettler-Heckman with whom he has two children: a son, Jonathan who is a physicist at the University of Pennsylvania, and a daughter, Alma, who is an assistant professor of history at the University of California at Santa Cruz.
