Overview
Sandra E. Black is a labor economist at UCLA (formerly UT Austin), affiliated with NBER and IZA. Her research focuses on intergenerational transmission of human capital and earnings, gender gaps in labor markets, and the returns to education. She is known for co-authoring the definitive handbook survey on intergenerational mobility (Black and Devereux 2011) and for an influential causal study of education transmission in Norway using compulsory schooling reform as an instrument.
Key Contributions / Features
- Co-authored Black and Devereux (2011), the Handbook of Labor Economics chapter synthesizing methodological advances and empirical findings on intergenerational mobility — the definitive reference on IGE measurement bias.
- Black, Devereux, and Salvanes (2005): exploited Norwegian compulsory-schooling reform as an IV for parental education; found OLS intergenerational education elasticity ≈ 0.22 but IV ≈ 0.04 and statistically insignificant, establishing that most of the OLS association reflects selection or genetics rather than causal human capital transmission.
- Research on the gender wage gap, returns to schooling, and the economics of family formation using Scandinavian register data.
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