James Heckman Biography - Nobel Prize Winner (2000)

James Heckman (born April 19, 1944) is an economist at the University of Chicago. He was the winner of Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2000 for his pioneering work in econometrics and microeconomics.

After graduating form Colorado College, he attended the University of Chicago for a single year before going to Princeton University where he received his Ph.D. in economics in 1971. Dr. Heckman then served as an Assistant Professor at Columbia University before moving to the University of Chicago. In June 2006 he was also appointed as the Professor of Science and Society at University College Dublin[1].

Heckman is well known for alerting econometricians in labor economics to "selection bias." The basic concept of selection bias is that that people may select into groups based on the (often correct) belief that entering the group will leave them better off than not. For example, people who graduate from college may have good reason to believe that they will fare especially well as a college graduate, while those that opt out may have reason to believe that they will not get at much from the experience. He is also well known for his work in the field labor economics, particularly regarding the efficacy of early childhood education programs.



LIST OF NOBEL PRIZE WINNERS IN ECONOMY
Akerlof, George A.
Allais, Maurice
Arrow, Kenneth J.
Aumann, Robert J.
Becker, Gary S.
Buchanan, James M., Jr.
Coase, Ronald H.
Debreu, Gerard
Engle, Robert F.
Fogel, Robert W.
Friedman, Milton
Frisch, Ragnar
Granger, Clive W. J.
Haavelmo, Trygve
Harsanyi, John C.
Heckman, James J.
Hayek, Friedrich August Von
Hicks, Sir John R.
Kahneman, Daniel
Kantorovich, Leonid Vitaliyevich
Klein, Lawrence R.
Koopmans, Tjalling C.
Kuznets, Simon
Kydland, Finn E.
Leontief, Wassily
Lewis, Sir Arthur
Lucas, Robert
Markowitz, Harry M.
McFadden, Daniel L.
Meade, James E.
Merton, Robert C.
Miller, Merton M.
Mirrlees, James A.
Modigliani, Franco
Mundell, Robert A.
Myrdal, Gunnar
Nash, John F.
North, Douglass C.
Ohlin, Bertil
Prescott, Edward C.
Samuelson, Paul A.
Schelling, Thomas C.
Scholes, Myron S.
Schultz, Theodore W.
Selten, Reinhard
Sen, Amartya
Sharpe, William F.
Simon, Herbert A.
Smith, Vernon L.
Solow, Robert M.
Spence, A. Michael
Stigler, George J.
Stiglitz, Joseph E.
Stone, Sir Richard
Tinbergen, Jan
Tobin, James
Vickrey, William
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