Robert A. Moffitt Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Economics Office: Mergenthaler Hall 429 Phone: (410) 516-7611 Fax: (410) 516-7600 E-mail: Curriculum Vitae (PDF)

Robert Moffitt is the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Economics at Johns Hopkins University, where he has worked since 1995. Prior to assuming his position at Johns Hopkins, Professor Moffitt was Professor of Economics at Brown University, where he taught for eleven years. He has also been a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Maryland, and worked for several years at Mathematica Policy Research, Inc.

Professor Moffitt's research is in the areas of labor economics and applied microeconometrics. A large portion of his research in labor economics has concerned the labor supply decisions of female heads of family and its response to the U.S. welfare system. His research on the welfare system has led to publications on the AFDC, Food Stamp, and Medicaid programs. He has also published research on the labor supply effects of social insurance programs, including Social Security, unemployment insurance, and Disability insurance as well as of the U.S. income tax system. Other of his papers have concerned real wage over the business cycle, volatility in the U.S. labor market, trends in U.S. earnings inequality, labor mobility, and state government decision-making. Part of Dr. Moffitt's research also is in population economics and economic demography, where he has estimated economic models of marriage, cohabitation, female headship, and fertility. His methodological research has led to publications on selection bias and limited-dependent variable models, nonlinear budget constraints, panel data, attrition, duration models, and causal modeling and program evaluation.

Dr. Moffitt is currently the chief editor of the American Economic Review and past editor of the Review of Economics and Statistics and Journal of Human Resources. He has served on several governmental advisory committees and commissions and is an active participant in federal and state policy gatherings on welfare reform and other social policy issues. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society. 

Research:

Unpublished Working Papers:

Estimating Marginal Treatment Effects in Heterogeneous Populations (December, 2006; revised, January, 2008) [PDF Copy]

The Econometrics of Data Combination (April, 2005) [PDF Copy]

Trends in the Covariance Structure of Earnings in the U.S.: 1969-1987 (July 1995) [PDF Copy]

Selected Chapters from Published Books:

Taxation and the Labor Supply: Decisions of the Affluent (2000) [PDF Copy]

Policy Interventions, Low Level Equilibria, and Social Interactions (2001) [PDF Copy]

Welfare Reform Projects and Papers

Nontechnical Papers on Program Evaluation and Causal Modeling

Data Sets

Classes Taught:

Economics 638 -- Microeconometrics II:
This is the second graduate course on microeconometrics in the department, covering the censored regression model, switching regression and selection bias models, treatment-effect models, panel data models, and GMM covariance estimation with panel data.
Economics 651 -- Labor Economics:
This is a graduate survey course in labor economics. The course covers most of the classic topics in labor, including labor supply, labor demand, human capital, compensating wage differentials, and unemployment and job search. Reflecting the field, much of the material is empirical in nature and will use advanced econometric techniques.