Katharine Abraham

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.

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.

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.

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.

Abraham is married and has two sons.

Books

• Abraham, Katharine G.; McKersie, Robert B. (1990). New developments in the labor market: toward a new institutional paradigm. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ISBN 9780262011181.  Based on papers presented at a conference held at MIT in June of 1987.
• Abraham, Katharine G.; Houseman, Susan N. (1993). Job security in America: lessons from Germany. Washington, D.C: Brookings Institution. ISBN 9780815700753. 
• Abraham, Katharine G.; Mackie, Christopher D. (2005). Beyond the market designing nonmarket accounts for the United States. Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press. ISBN 9780309093194. 
• Abraham, Katharine G.; Spletzer, James R.; Harper, Michael J. (2010). Labor in the new economy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 9780226001432. 

Journal articles

• Abraham, Katharine G.; Houseman, Susan N. (May 1993). "Female workers as a buffer in the Japanese economy". The American Economic Review, special issue: Papers and Proceedings of the 105th Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association. American Economic Association. 83 (2): 45–51. JSTOR 2117638. 
• Abraham, Katharine G.; Houseman, Susan N. (Summer 1993). "Job security in America: a better approach". The Brookings Review. Brookings Institution. 11 (3): 34–35. doi:10.2307/20080404. JSTOR 20080404. 
• Abraham, Katharine G.; Haltiwanger, John C. (September 1995). "Real wages and the business cycle". Journal of Economic Literature. American Economic Association. 33 (3): 1215–1264. JSTOR 2729121. 
• Abraham, Katharine G. (March 2003). "Toward a cost-of-living index: progress and prospects". Journal of Economic Perspectives. American Economic Association. 17 (1): 45–58. doi:10.1257/089533003321164949. JSTOR 3216839. 
• Abraham, Katharine G.; Maitland, Aaron; Bianchi, Suzanne M. (2006). "Nonresponse in the American time use survey: who is missing from the data and how much does it matter?". Public Opinion Quarterly, special issue: Nonresponse Bias in Household Surveys. Oxford Journals. 70 (5): 676–703. doi:10.1093/poq/nfl037. 
• Abraham, Katharine G.; Spletzer, James R. (May 2009). "New evidence on the returns to job skills". The American Economic Review, special issue: Papers and Proceedings of the 121st Annual Meeting of the American Economic Association. American Economic Association. 99 (2): 52–57. doi:10.1257/aer.99.2.52. JSTOR 25592374. 
• Abraham, Katharine G.; Haltiwanger, John C.; Sandusky, Kristin; Spletzer, James R. (April 2013). "Exploring differences in employment between household and establishment data". Journal of Labor Economics, special issue: The Princeton Data Improvement Initiative (Part 2). Chicago Journals. 31 (S1): S129–S172. doi:10.1086/669062. JSTOR 669062. 
• Abraham, Katharine G.; Houseman, Susan N. (October 2014). "Short-time compensation as a tool to mitigate job loss? Evidence on the U.S. experience during the recent recession". Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society. Wiley. 53 (4): 543–567. doi:10.1111/irel.12069. SSRN 2048540.  Pdf.
• Working papers and National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) papers.