Dear Labor Studies Colleagues -
I am very sorry to share the news that Finis Welch, a key contributor to
empirical labor economics and a former NBER Research Associate, passed
away last week. He was a Distinguished Professor of Economics,
Emeritus, at Texas A&M University, where he joined the faculty in 1991.
Prior to his move to College Station, he taught at UCLA for nearly two
decades.
Welch made central contributions to the study of the returns to
education, the structure of wages and in particular racial wage
disparities, the labor market effects of minimum wages, and the links
between worker skills and earnings. In 2007, he received the Jacob
Mincer Award for Lifetime Contributions to Labor Economics from SOLE.
Welch received his undergraduate degree from the University of Houston
and his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. He was appointed an NBER
research fellow in 1969, working on a study of the interaction between
education and agricultural productivity, and he was an NBER research
associate from 1970 unti 1976. He holds a special place in NBER history
as the author of NBER working paper #1, "Education, Information, and
Efficiency," which was issued in June 1973:
https://www.nber.org/papers/w0001.pdf
Welch was one of the pioneers in modern empirical economics, and he will
be deeply missed.
Jim Poterba
Received on Sun Aug 30 2020 - 20:43:17 EDT
