Dan A. Black

About

Dan A. Black is a professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. He also serves as a senior fellow at the National Opinion Research Center. His research focuses on labor economics and applied econometrics. Black is the project director for the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Labor Economics, Labour Economics, and Journal of Urban Economics. His papers have appeared in top journals in economics, statistics, and demography. He has served on panels for the Census Bureau, the Department of Education, the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Science Foundation, and the National Academy of Science, and has served as a consultant for the governments of New Zealand and Australia. Before joining Chicago Harris, he was on faculty at the University of Kentucky and Syracuse University, and held visiting appointments at the University of Chicago, Australian National University, and Carnegie Mellon University. Black holds a BA and MA in history from the University of Kansas and an MS and PhD in economics from Purdue University.

Research topics

• Economics
• Demographic economics
• Computer Science
• Data Mining
• Business
• Labour economics
• World Wide Web
• Econometrics
• Mathematics
• Telecommunications

Selected publications

• The Methuselah Effect: The Pernicious Impact of Unreported Deaths on Old-Age Mortality Estimates

  Demography · 2017-11-01 · 25 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We examine inferences about old-age mortality that arise when researchers use survey data matched to death records. We show that even small rates of failure to match respondents can lead to substantial bias in the measurement of mortality rates at older ages. This type of measurement error is consequential for three strands in the demographic literature: (1) the deceleration in mortality rates at old ages; (2) the black-white mortality crossover; and (3) the relatively low rate of old-age mortal…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A Cross-Cohort Analysis of Human Capital Specialization and the College Gender Wage Gap

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2019-10-01 · 17 citations

  reportOpen accessSenior author

  In this paper, we exploit new data to assess gender differences in pre-labor market specialization among the college educated and highlight how those differences have evolved over time. We highlight new results pertaining to gender differences in the mapping between undergraduate major and subsequent occupational sorting. To perform our analysis, we introduce new indices in potential wage space that measure gender differences in major choice and separately the subsequent occupational sorting con…

  PublisherDOI

• Simple Tests for Selection: Learning More from Instrumental Variables

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2017-01-01 · 16 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• What we can learn from selected, unmatched data: Measuring internet inequality in Chicago

  Computers Environment and Urban Systems · 2022 · 12 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Simple Tests for Selection: Learning More from Instrumental Variables

  Labour Economics · 2022-08-01 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access1st author

  We provide simple tests for selection on unobserved variables in the Vytlacil-Imbens-Angrist framework for Local Average Treatment Effects (LATEs). Our setup allows researchers not only to test for selection on either or both of the treated and untreated outcomes, but also to assess the magnitude of the selection effect. We show that it applies to the standard binary instrument case, as well as to experiments with imperfect compliance and fuzzy regression discontinuity designs, and we link it to…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Proposal: TLS: Where are all the Female Engineers?

  NSF · $227k · 2009–2013

• NIH Grant R21HD069778

  NIH · $376k · 2014

Frequent coauthors

• Lowell J. Taylor

  Carnegie Mellon University

  328 shared

• Seth Sanders

  Cornell University

  281 shared

• Natalia Kolesnikova

  Academy of Law Management of the Federal Penal Service of Russia

  234 shared

• Yu-Chieh Hsu

  National Opinion Research Center

  42 shared

• Jeffrey A. Smith

  41 shared

• Mark C. Berger

  39 shared

• Lynne Steuerle Schofield

  Swarthmore College

  30 shared

• John M. Barron

  Purdue University West Lafayette

  19 shared

Labs

• Dan A. Black LabPI

Education

• B.A., History

  University of Kansas

• M.A., History

  University of Kansas

• M.S., Economics

  Purdue University

• Ph.D., Economics

  Purdue University

Awards & honors

• NIHCM Foundation Research Award (2018)

Similar researchers at University of Chicago

• Christopher Blattmanh-30
• Christopher R. Berryh-25
• Anjali Adukiah-7