Michael F. Lovenheim

I am the Donald C. Opatrny '74 Chair of the Department of Economics at Cornell University and a Professor of Economics, Industrial and Labor Relations, and Public Policy. I also am a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in the Economics of Education and Public Economics Working Groups and am a CESifo Research Network Fellow  in the Economics of Education. I currently serve as a co-editor of the Journal of Human Resources and am a member of the National Longitudinal Survey (NLS) Technical Review Committee. I received my PhD from the University of Michigan in Economics in 2007 (Go Blue!) and my undergraduate degree in Economics from Amherst College in 2000. After receiving my PhD, I was the inaugural Searle Freeedom Trust Post-doctoral Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR). I have been a Cornell faculty member since 2009. 

My research areas span the economics of education, public economics, and labor economics. My research in the economics of education focuses on both higher education and K-12. I study how individual, institutional, and government resources affect educational decisions and outcomes among higher education students as well as the return to educational investment decisions such as the quality of school one attends and the choice of major. My K-12 education research mostly focuses on teacher labor markets, with a specific interest in the role of teachers unions and collective bargaining as well as teacher incentive pay. Recently, I have been increasingly interested in the intersection between health and education, examining questions related to special education and school-based health interventions. I wrote a textbook designed for use in undergraduate courses on the Economics of Education with my long-time collaborator Sarah Turner, published by Worth. 

My non-education research examines a range of policy-relevant issues in public and labor economics. Much of my research examines questions related to local taxation and regulation. I have written a number of papers exploring tobacco and alcohol regulation, with a focus on the role of cross-border purchasing behavior. Some other papers explore the impact of product and nutrient specific taxes on consumer purchasing behavior and nutrition, changes to the task content of private sector union coverage, and a task-based measure of monopsony power. I have written a number of papers that examine the role of housing wealth in driving key household decisions, such as educational investments, fertility, and health care spending, as well as understanding how (and why) housing wealth is transmitted across generations.