An Economist With Education Creds Lands at Treasury
Here's one that got by me: Alan B. Krueger, a Princeton University economist who occasionally studies education, is now the assistant secretary of economic policy at the U.S. Department of Treasury.
According to this Reuters article, Krueger's nomination was confirmed by the Senate on May 7.
An award-winning scholar, Krueger has conducted research on everything from
environmental economics to terrorism. Up until February, he was also a contributor to the Economix blog at the NYT.
In education, he's weighed the costs and benefits of reducing class sizes, being educated in a state with a school system of higher-than-average quality, and completing additional years of schooling. (For that last study, Krueger and his research partner attended a convention for twins in order to find twins with different schooling experiences and compare their earnings later in life.)
He also drew some attention for his 2003 reanalysis of New York City's experiment with private school vouchers, which concluded, contrary to some earlier studies, that the program yielded no special academic gains for African-American students.
