Francine Blau Wins IZA Labor Economics Prize

Francine Blau (right) with Rebecca Blank

Academy Fellow Francine D. Blau was awarded the Institute for the Study of Labor Economics Prize in Labor Economics, the world’s top award for labor economics. The IZA Prize, as it is known (IZA is an acronym drawn from the German translation of the institute’s name), carries with it a $67,000 cash grant.  Blau, the first woman to receive the IZA Prize, is credited with changing the way scholars and policy-makers think about the role of gender in pay and other economic issues when she first started researching the topic in the 1970s and was described by the Institute as having “laid the foundation for more equality and equity in the labor market.” Blau is the Frances Perkins Professor of Industrial and Labor Relations and Labor Economics at Cornell University and a member of the board of directors of the American Academy.  She is also a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a Research Fellow of the Center for Economic Studies/Ifo Institute in Munich, Germany and of IZA in Bonn, Germany.  She is the author of Equal Pay in the Office and, with Lawrence Kahn, of At Home and Abroad: U.S. Labor Market Performance in International Perspective (recipient of the Richard A. Lester Prize for the outstanding book in labor economics and industrial relations for 2002) and the editor, with David Grusky and Mary Brinton, of The Declining Significance of Gender?, and with Ronald Ehrenberg of Gender and Family Issues in the Workplace.  She is also coauthor, with Marianne Ferber and Anne Winkler, of The Economics of Women, Men, and Work currently in its sixth edition. A recent interview with Professor Blau provides additional background on her work.