Preceded by Janet L. Norwood President Barack Obama Succeeded by Betsey Stevenson | Succeeded by Kathleen Utgoff Preceded by Cecilia Rouse Field Labour economics | |
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President Bill Clinton
George W. Bush Education Harvard University, Iowa State University People also search for Susan N. Houseman, Robert B McKersie, Christopher Mackie, Michael S. Harper | ||
Katharine G. Abraham (born 28 August 1954) is the Director of the Maryland Center for Economics and Policy, and a professor of Survey Methodology and Economics at the University of Maryland. She was Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics from 1993–2001 and a member of the Council of Economic Advisers from 2011–2013.
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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.
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. 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.
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.
Awards
She is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and the recipient of an honorary doctorate by Iowa State University. She has been awarded the Julius Shiskin Award for Economic Statistics (2002), 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.
Personal life
Abraham is married and has two sons.