Dr. Julia Lane Chosen as the 2014 Recipient of the Julius Shiskin Memorial Award for Economic Statistics
Washington, D.C. – Dr. Julia Lane, a senior managing economist and Institute Fellow at the American Institutes for Research (AIR), has been chosen to receive the 2014 Julius Shiskin Memorial Award for Economic Statistics in recognition of her role in developing a Census Bureau program on employment dynamics.
The award recognizes “unusually original and important contributions in the development of economic statistics or in the use of statistics in interpreting the economy.” It is co-sponsored by the Washington Statistical Society, the National Association for Business Economics, and the Business and Economics Statistics Section of the American Statistical Association.
Dr. Lane originated the Longitudinal Employer Household Dynamics (LEHD) program, the first large-scale linked employer-employee dataset in the United States. LEHD provides matched employee-employer data for most states on income and worker mobility and on the entry and exit of firms.
Dr. Lane is also a pioneer in the field of science of science policy. At AIR, she mobilized a team of researchers and university administrators at the Committee on Institutional Cooperation to create UMETRICS (Universities: Measuring the ImpacTs of Research on Innovation, Competitiveness, and Science), a scientific framework that informs research management, enables evidence-based decision-making and supports credible advocacy. The initial study, published in the April 4, 2014 issue of Science, found that less than 20 percent of federal dollars earmarked for university research was spent on faculty and that much of the funding was used to purchase goods and services from small businesses across the United States.
Besides her AIR work, Dr. Lane is an invited professor of economics, BETA University of Strasbourg CNRS, Chercheur, Observatoire des Sciences et des Techniques, Paris; and professor, Melbourne Institute of Applied Economics and Social Research, University of Melbourne. She was awarded the prestigious Gutenberg Chair at a ceremony on January 24, 2014 in Strasbourg, France, for her work, “Examining the Results of Research Investments: A Multi Country Study.”
Before joining AIR in 2012, Dr. Lane led the Science of Science and Innovation Policy (SciSIP) program at the National Science Foundation (NSF). There, she created initiatives and built stakeholder support among 16 science-funding agencies and the White House that led to the development of STARMETRICS (Science and Technology for America's Reinvestment: Measuring the Effect of Research on Innovation, Competitiveness and Science), a partnership between science agencies and research institutions to publically document the outcomes of science investments.
Dr. Lane has over 65 refereed articles in leading economics journals, and edited or authored eight books. She has been working with a number of national governments to document the results of their science investments and testified before committees of the U.S. Congress and the European Parliament.
About AIR
Established in 1946, with headquarters in Washington, D.C., the American Institutes for Research (AIR) is a nonpartisan, not-for-profit organization that conducts behavioral and social science research and delivers technical assistance both domestically and internationally in the areas of health, education, and workforce productivity. For more information, visit www.air.org.
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