"Chicago labor economist" is probably most of what you need to know. He spends a lot of time trying to argue that industry wage differentials are due to unobservable differences in the workers in those industries, and other empirical work to support "competitive" hypotheses about the labor market. He is a first-rate statistician but seemas to have known everything he wanted to about the economy before actually going out and studying it. His most famous papers are with Larry Katz (QJE Feb 92), where they argue that the right speedups and slowdowns and wiggles long haloos of supply and demand factors can explain changes in the return to education in the 70s and 80s, and with Chinhui Juhn and Brooks Pierce (never actually published) where they do something similar for this never-explained concept called "unobserved skill," and with Robert Topel (in Lang and Leonard, Unemployment and the Structure of Earnings) where they use compensating differentials theories to justify the industry wage structure. Etc. Etc. This is probably more than you wanted to know, Jim. I know nothing about what might have happened between him and any ex-wives and I don't care. Cheers, Tavis On Fri, 14 Mar 1997, James Devine wrote: > does anyone in pen-l land know anything about the work of Kevin Murphy of > the University of Chicago, who just won the John Bates Clark award?
