Overview
Robert J. Willis is a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan and a Research Associate at the Economics Research Center/NORC. His research spans the economics of the family (marriage, divorce, fertility, cohabitation), human capital theory, and retirement economics. He is co-PI of the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and a foundational figure in the economics of marriage and fertility alongside Gary Becker and Yoram Weiss.
Key Contributions / Features
- Willis and Rosen (1979, JPE): Applied Roy's (1951) comparative advantage model to educational choice, showing that college attendance is driven by comparative advantage across two earnings distributions (w1,w0), not by absolute ability. Found negative selection on the no-college counterfactual — college-goers would have earned below-average wages in the non-college sector — establishing the foundational self-selection framework for returns-to-schooling research and anticipating the MTE/essential heterogeneity literature by fifteen years. See Returns to Schooling, Essential Heterogeneity.
- Weiss and Willis (1997, JOLE): Co-developed with Yoram Weiss the panel-data framework for identifying earning-capacity surprises as the primary driver of marital dissolution using NLS-72; found that wife's rising earning capacity destabilizes marriage through the outside-option channel. See Weiss and Willis 1997 — Match Quality, New Information, and Marital Dissolution.
- Willis and Michael (1994): "Innovation in Family Formation: Evidence on Cohabitation in the U.S." — analysis of cohabitation trends in the NLS-72.
- Weiss and Willis (1985): "Children as Collective Goods" — children as marital public goods whose misallocation post-divorce stabilizes marriage and creates welfare costs of dissolution.
- Health and Retirement Study: Co-PI of HRS, the principal longitudinal survey of Americans 50+ that underlies most of the U.S. aging, retirement, and health-inequality literature.
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