Katharine Abraham

Katherine Abraham

Abraham in 1993
Commissioner of Labor Statistics
Bureau of Labor Statistics
In office
October 1993  October 2001
President
Preceded by Janet L. Norwood
Succeeded by Kathleen Utgoff
Member of the Council of Economic Advisers
In office
2011–2013
President Barack Obama
Preceded by Cecilia Rouse
Succeeded by Betsey Stevenson
Personal details
Born (1954-08-28) August 28, 1954
Ames, Iowa[1]

Academic career

Institutions Sloan School of Management, MIT
University of Maryland, College Park
Field labor economics
Alma mater
Awards

Katharine G. Abraham (born 28 August 1954[3]) is the Director of the Maryland Center for Economics and Policy,[4] and a professor of Survey Methodology and Economics[5] at the University of Maryland. She was Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics from 1993–2001[2] and a member of the Council of Economic Advisers from 2011–2013.[6][7]

Education

Abraham holds a BS degree in Economics from Iowa State University (1976) and a PhD in Economics from Harvard University (1982). She was an assistant professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management and a Research Associate at the Brookings Institution before joining the faculty at the University of Maryland in 1988.[1]

Career

During her time as Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Abraham laid the groundwork for the American Time Use Survey, the first U.S. government survey of time use, and established the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee. During extensive public debate on the Consumer Price Index in the 1990s, Abraham testified repeatedly before Congress on the shortcomings of existing methodology and the necessity of making revisions based on objective research.[8][9][10] She expanded coverage of the prices of services in the Producer Price Index; instituted improvements in the Current Employment Statistics, including the substitution of a probability sample for the quota sample; accelerated delivery of employment and wage statistics; and took steps toward expanding coverage of wages and salaries in the Occupational Employment Statistics program.[2]

Abraham's research has included studies of the effects of job duration on wages; the effects of advertising on job vacancies, wages and the business cycle; and comparisons among the U.S., European, and Japanese labor markets; work-sharing policies, unemployment, and job openings; the operation of internal labor markets; and the measurement of market and nonmarket economic activity.[11][12]

Awards

She is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research[13] and the recipient of an honorary doctorate by Iowa State University. She has been awarded the Julius Shiskin Award for Economic Statistics (2002),[2] the Roger Herriot Award for Innovation in Federal Statistics (2010), and the Susan C. Eaton Scholar-Practitioner Award of the Labor and Employment Relations Association (2013). She is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Society of Labor Economists.[4]

Personal life

Abraham is married and has two sons.[1]

Selected bibliography

Books
Journal articles

References

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