About

Michael Lovenheim is a Professor of Economics in the Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy and the ILR School at Cornell University. He is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a Senior Fellow (adjunct) at the Hoover Institution. His research areas include labor economics, public finance, and the economics of education, with a particular focus on the interplay between education systems and the labor market. His recent work examines the effects of state higher education funding on long-term educational and financial outcomes, the impact of college major choices on student earnings, and how these choices influence gender and racial earnings inequality. Additionally, he studies the labor market returns to college coursework, the productivity of for-profit colleges, and the influence of teachers unions on school districts and students. Beyond education, his research explores how housing wealth affects household investment decisions, the relationship between worker skills and labor market power, and changes in the skill content of private sector union coverage. Lovenheim co-authored the first comprehensive textbook on the Economics of Education in 2017. He earned his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Michigan in 2007, joined Cornell in 2009 after a post-doctoral fellowship at Stanford, and served as the Donald C. Opatrny ’74 Chair of the Department of Economics from 2018 to 2023. Currently, he is a co-editor at the Journal of Human Resources and the inaugural Director of the Cornell Center for Education Policy and Workforce Development, which focuses on aligning educational skills with labor market needs through policy research and partnerships with state governments.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Economics
• Medicine
• Business
• Computer Science
• Computer Security
• Public economics
• Statistics
• Psychology
• Environmental health
• Economic growth

Selected publications

• The Contribution of College Majors to Gender and Racial Earnings Differences

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2026-01-01 · 2 citations

  reportOpen access

  Gender and racial/ethnic gaps in labor market earnings remain large, even among college-goers.Cross-gender and race/ethnic differences in choice of and returns to college major are potentially important contributors.Following Texas public high school graduates for up to 20 years through college and the labor market, we assess gender and racial differences in college major choices and the consequences of these choices.Women and underrepresented minorities are less likely than men, Whites, and Asians to major in high earning fields like business, economics, engineering, and computer science, however we also show that they experience lower returns to these majors.Differences in major-specific returns relative to liberal arts explain about one quarter of the gender, White-Black, and White-Hispanic (but not White-Asian) earnings gaps among four-year college students and become larger contributors to earnings gaps than differential major distributions as workers age.We present suggestive evidence that differences in occupation choices within field are a key driver of the differences in returns across groups.The work shines light on the roles that college major choice and returns by gender and race contribute to inequality.

  PublisherDOI

• The Contribution of College Majors to Gender and Racial Earnings Differences

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2026-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• The effect of housing wealth on health care spending

  Journal of Health Economics · 2025-08-21 · 1 citations

  article1st author
  PublisherDOI

• The long-run impacts of banning affirmative action in US higher education

  Oxford Review of Economic Policy · 2024-01-01 · 4 citations

  articleSenior author

  Abstract This paper estimates the long-run impacts of banning affirmative action on men and women from under-represented minority (URM) racial and ethnic groups in the United States. Using data from the US Census and American Community Survey, we use a difference-in-differences framework to compare the college degree completion, graduate degree completion, earnings, and employment of URM individuals to non-URM individuals before and after affirmative action bans went into effect across several US states. We also employ event study analyses and alternative estimators to confirm the validity of our approach and discuss the generalizability of the findings. Results suggest that banning affirmative action results in a decline in URM women’s college degree completion, earnings, and employment relative to non-Hispanic White women, driven largely by impacts on Hispanic women. Thus, affirmative action bans resulted in an increase in racial/ethnic disparities in both college degree completion and earnings among women. Effects on URM men are more ambiguous and indicate significant heterogeneity across states, with some estimates pointing to a possible positive impact on labour market outcomes of Black men. These results suggest that the relative magnitude of college quality versus mismatch effects vary for URM men and women and highlight the importance of disaggregating results by gender, race, and ethnicity. We conclude by discussing how our results compare with others in the literature and directions for future research.

  PublisherDOI

• The Effect of Vaccine Mandates on Disease Spread

  The Journal of Human Resources · 2024-04-08 · 4 citations

  articleSenior author

  <h3>Abstract</h3> Nearly 700 4-year U.S. colleges mandated students receive COVID-19 vaccinations in fall 2021. Using data on college policies and county health, we estimate how mandates affect surrounding communities. Event studies from August to November 2021 show that mandates covering all colleges in a county reduced COVID-19 deaths by 5.6 per 100,000 persons, a 4.6% reduction in the U.S. total during this period. Mandates reduced COVID cases by 504 and ICU admissions by 16.2 per 100,000, though we see no statistically significant impact on hospitalizations. Impacts are larger in counties with larger college populations and low estimated ex-ante student vaccination rates.

  PublisherDOI

• The Long-Run Impacts of Banning Affirmative Action in US Higher Education

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• The Changing Skill Content of Private-Sector Union Coverage

  Industrial and Labor Relations Review · 2024-07-27

  article

  Concurrent with the decline in private-sector unionization over the past half century, a shift has occurred in the type of work covered by unions. The authors take a skill-based approach to study this shift. For both men and women, private-sector unionized jobs have changed to require more non-routine, cognitive skills, and for women, less routine, manual skills. Union/non-union skill differences have grown, with unionized jobs requiring relatively more non-routine, cognitive skill and relatively more routine, manual and routine, cognitive skills. The authors decompose these changes into 1) changes in skills within an occupation, 2) changes in worker concentration across existing occupations, and 3) changes to the occupational mix from entry and exit. Most of the changes they document are driven by the second two forces. Finally, the article discusses how this evidence can be reconciled with a model of skill-biased technological change that directly accounts for the institutional framework surrounding collective bargaining.

  PublisherDOI

• Misinformation, consumer risk perceptions, and markets: The impact of an information shock on vaping and smoking cessation

  Economic Inquiry · 2024 · 3 citations

  • Computer Security
  • Computer Science
  • Business

  Abstract We study the impact of an information shock created by an outbreak of lung injuries apparently related to e‐cigarettes. We use data from multiple sources: surveys of risk perceptions conducted before, during, and after the outbreak; an in‐depth survey on risk perceptions and vaping and smoking behavior; and national aggregate time‐series sales data. We find that after the outbreak, consumer perceptions of the riskiness of e‐cigarettes sharply increased. From our estimated e‐cigarette demand models, we conclude that the information shock reduced e‐cigarette demand and the use of e‐cigarettes for smoking cessation by about 30 percent.

  PublisherDOI

• The Returns to College Major Choice: Average and Distributional Effects, Career Trajectories, and Earnings Variability

  The Review of Economics and Statistics · 2024-09-16 · 10 citations

  article

  Abstract A growing literature examining labor market returns to college major is motivated by large returns to skill. Prior research focuses on mean effects rather than earnings growth and variability. Using administrative data from Texas, we find that mean differences mask important features of the returns to college majors. First, earnings growth varies across fields. Second, there is considerable effect heterogeneity across workers. Third, major choice affects earnings variability within workers over time. We use our results to simulate a lifecyle utility model and compare mid-career utility and mean earnings returns across fields while highlighting the important role of risk preferences.

  PublisherDOI

• The Effect of Vaccine Mandates on Disease Spread: Evidence from College COVID-19 Mandates

  2024-03-05

  articleSenior author

  The study examines the effect of college- and university-imposed COVID-19 vaccine mandates for students on county-level COVID-19 infections, hospitalizations, deaths, and other health outcomes leveraging several rich sources of data. The researchers obtain information on vaccine mandates for the fall 2021 semester, along with institutions’ semester start dates, mask mandates, and required COVID-19 testing policies from the College Crisis Initiative (C2i) at Davidson College. C2i’s staff collected vaccine mandate information through a combination of data-scraping and directly visiting colleges’ websites between July and August, 2021—just prior to the start of colleges’ fall semesters—with follow-up collection between October and November 2021. The data are subsequently combined with institutional characteristics, including location, enrollment, and the distinction between public and private control, sourced from the National Center for Education Statistics’ Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). Additionally, the information is integrated with county-level COVID-19 case rates, vaccinations, hospitalizations, and mortality figures, which are publicly accessible through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The researchers also acquire data on county test positivity rates from CovidActNow.org, data on doctors’ visits from insurance claims, and data on individual vaccination status from the Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey. In addition, the researchers collect county-week-level data on per capita COVID-19 tests from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences’ COVID-19 Pandemic Vulnerability Index (PVI) and test positivity rates from CovidActNow.org. Together, these data sources provide rich weekly information on public health outcomes at the local level throughout the summer and fall of 2021.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Scott A. Imberman

  Michigan State University

  110 shared

• Rodney Andrews

  The University of Texas at Dallas

  62 shared

• Samuel Kleiner

  Federal Trade Commission

  43 shared

• Joel Slemrod

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  42 shared

• Kevin J. Mumford

  42 shared

• Kevin Stange

  University of Michigan–Ann Arbor

  41 shared

• Sarah Cohodes

  40 shared

• Daniel Grossman

  37 shared

Awards & honors

• Senior Fellow (adjunct) at the Hoover Institution
• Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Resear…
• Donald C. Opatrny ’74 Chair of the Department of Economics a…
• Inaugural Director of the Cornell Center for Education Polic…