Katharine Abraham

Katharine G. Abraham (born August 28, 1954) is an American economist who is a Distinguished University Professor of economics and survey methodology at the University of Maryland. She was commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics from 1993 to 2001 and a member of the Council of Economic Advisers from 2011 to 2013. She was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2022 and, in 2024, was elected to be the President-Elect and then the President of the American Economic Association.

Education Abraham holds a Bachelor of Science degree in economics from Iowa State University (1976) and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University (1982).

Career Abraham 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; obtained funding to launch the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey; 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 program, 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.

In 2016–2017, Abraham served as Chair of the Commission on Evidence Based Policymaking. Many of the commission's recommendations were enacted into law as part of the Foundations for Evidence-Based Policymaking Act of 2018 (the Evidence Act).

Abraham's research has included studies on unemployment, job vacancies, wages and the business cycle; comparisons among the U.S., European, and Japanese labor markets; work-sharing policies; the operation of internal labor markets; the gig economy; and the measurement of market and nonmarket economic activity.

Awards Abraham is a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and the recipient of an honorary doctorate from 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), the Susan C. Eaton Scholar-Practitioner Award of the Labor and Employment Relations Association (2013), and was named a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association in 2020. She is a fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Society of Labor Economists. She was elected to fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020.

Selected bibliography Books Based on papers presented at a conference held at MIT in June 1987.

Journal articles

Pdf. Working papers and National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) papers.