Professor Goldin was completing a dissertation at Chicago under Robert Fogel's supervision when she taught a principles of microeconomics class at Wisconsin. I took that class.
Professor Goldin was being recruited by Princeton at the time and subsequently called to Harvard. We've noted some of her work on those labor market outcomes, as well as research on the effect of third-party payments on tuitions.
Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution posted much more. Let me highlight this. "Goldin wasn’t just downloading datasets she discovered and developed them!"
Yes. How many times did I dress students down for saying "there's no data" when they meant "I can't find a government file to download?" Sometimes when you dig it out yourself, you can tackle anomalies, and the fun is in the anomalies.
Yes, that's a high-risk, possibly high-reward research strategy, and the prudent thing to do might be to stick to the safe topics. The recognition, though, might go to the people with the chops and the persistence to track down the anomalies and analyze the heck out of them.
Well done.
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