David Deming

About

David Deming is the Isabelle and Scott Black Professor of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School, the William Henry Bloomberg Professor of Economics at Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and holds a teaching appointment at Harvard Graduate School of Education. He serves as the Danoff Dean of Harvard College and has served as the Academic Dean of HKS from 2021 to 2024. His research focuses on higher education, skills, technology, artificial intelligence, and the future of the labor market. He co-directs the Project on Workforce, a cross-Harvard initiative aimed at building better pathways to economic mobility through the school-to-work transition, and the Skills Lab, which creates performance-based measures of soft skills such as teamwork and decision-making. Deming is a Principal Investigator at the CLIMB Initiative, studying and improving the role of higher education in social mobility. He has received awards including the Sherwin Rosen Prize for outstanding contributions to Labor Economics in 2022 and the David N. Kershaw Prize for distinguished contributions to public policy and management under age 40 in 2018. He writes columns for The Atlantic, previously for the New York Times Economic View, and maintains a Substack newsletter called Forked Lightning.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Labour economics
• Economics
• Artificial Intelligence
• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Management
• Social psychology
• Knowledge management
• Marketing

Selected publications

• Earnings Dynamics, Changing Job Skills, and STEM Careers*

  The Quarterly Journal of Economics · 2020 · 332 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This article studies the impact of changing job skills on career earnings dynamics for college graduates. We measure changes in the skill content of occupations between 2007 and 2019 using detailed job descriptions from a near universe of online job postings. We then develop a simple model where the returns to work experience are a race between on-the-job learning and skill obsolescence. Obsolescence lowers the return to experience, flattening the age-earnings profile in faster-changing…

  DOI

• Diversifying Society’s Leaders? The Determinants and Causal Effects of Admission to Highly Selective Private Colleges

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2023-07-01 · 104 citations

  reportOpen access

  Leadership positions in the U.S. are disproportionately held by graduates of a few highly selective private colleges. Could such colleges — which currently have many more students from high-income families than low-income families — increase the socioeconomic diversity of America’s leaders by changing their admissions policies? We use anonymized admissions data from several private and public colleges linked to income tax records and SAT and ACT test scores to study this question. Children from…

  PublisherDOI

• Team Players: How Social Skills Improve Team Performance

  Econometrica · 2021 · 100 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Most jobs require teamwork. Are some people good team players? In this paper, we design and test a new method for identifying individual contributions to team production. We randomly assign people to multiple teams and predict team performance based on previously assessed individual skills. Some people consistently cause their team to exceed its predicted performance. We call these individuals “team players.” Team players score significantly higher on a well‐established measure of social intelli…

  DOI

• Structural Increases in Demand for Skill after the Great Recession

  AEA Papers and Proceedings · 2020 · 40 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  In this paper, we use detailed job vacancy data to estimate changes in skill demand in the years since the Great Recession. The share of job vacancies requiring a bachelor's degree increased by more than 60 percent between 2007 and 2019, with faster growth in professional occupations and high-wage cities. Since the labor market was becoming tighter over this period, cyclical “upskilling” is unlikely to explain our findings.

  DOI

• The School-to-Prison Pipeline: Long-Run Impacts of School Suspensions on Adult Crime

  American Economic Journal Economic Policy · 2024-10-31 · 18 citations

  articleSenior author

  Schools must balance student behavior management with the potential negatives of strict discipline. These policies can deter misbehavior but may stigmatize students and expose them to the criminal justice system early. We assess the impact of attending a strict discipline school on achievement, educational attainment, and adult criminal activity. Using data from a boundary change and principal switches, we find that higher suspension rates have significant negative long-term effects. Students at…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Justine Hastings

  Coventry University

  72 shared

• Douglas O. Staiger

  Dartmouth College

  71 shared

• Thomas J. Kane

  Center For Policy Research

  71 shared

• Claudia Goldin

  Harvard University

  21 shared

• Lawrence F. Katz

  National Bureau of Economic Research

  20 shared

• Marco Trizzino

  Imperial College London

  18 shared

• Michael Lovenheim

  17 shared

• Richard Patterson

  16 shared

Awards & honors

• Sherwin Rosen Prize for outstanding contributions to Labor E…
• David N. Kershaw Prize for distinguished contributions to th…

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