V. Joseph Hotz on women’s labor supply & fertility and balancing data privacy & use

V. Joseph Hotz, Research Professor at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago and Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Economics and Public Policy Emeritus at Duke University, discusses his research on life cycle models of  labor supply and fertility, the challenges of balancing data disclosure risk with data usability, and the child tax credit’s impact on child poverty.

In this episode, Hotz and Ashenfelter discuss:

• Hotz’s early years growing up in Illinois and his fascination with the Mississippi River. “...I had a small-town upbringing… it was a great time.. [going] up and down the river and finding out about the history and traditions.”
• His undergraduate years at Notre Dame and his early interest in the humanities. “The economics department was not all that strong… so, I spent most of my time surveying… classics, some political philosophers who I found really extremely interesting. And that's what I thought I wanted to do when I went to graduate school.”
• How Hotz ended up taking a “gap” year before attending graduate school and working as a research assistant with the Gary Income Maintenance Experiment in Gary, Indiana. “It was an interesting project because it was looking at consumption…I learned a lot about [getting the data] cleaned, and it was my first lesson in what you can screw up with a bad set of questionnaire design.”
• His dissertation at the University of Wisconsin. “I… ended up doing a dissertation on a life cycle model and estimation of women's labor supply and fertility…You [factor] in fertility and that plays [an important] role in affecting … the timing of entering the labor force.”
• Hotz’s research on disclosure, confidentiality, and privacy protection as it relates to federal statistical data. “There's a real problem here of protecting people's confidentiality… We're still very much in that process, in an early stage in that process, but we're making some progress.”
• His research on the impact of the child tax credit on child poverty. “We estimate that it cut child poverty in half… We concluded that it had a big impact on child poverty.”  

V. Joseph Hotz earned his Ph.D. from the University of Madison-Wisconsin in 1980. He previously served on the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles and Carnegie Mellon University in addition to Duke University and the University of Chicago. He is well known for his contributions to the economics of the family, economic demography, the development of new data sources, and the role of confidentiality in data collection. "The Work Goes On"—a podcast produced by Princeton's Industrial Relations Section (IR Section)—is an oral history of industrial relations and labor economics hosted by Princeton's Orley Ashenfelter.