Harry Holzer
John LaFarge, Jr. S.J. Chair and Professor
Harry J. Holzer is the John LaFarge Jr. SJ Professor of Public Policy at Georgetown University' McCourt School of Public Policy, a Nonresident Senior Fellow at Brookings, and a former AIR Scholar at the American Institute for Research in Washington DC. He is a former Chief Economist for the U.S. Department of Labor and a former Professor of Economics at Michigan State University. He was a founding faculty director of the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality. He is a research fellow at IZA (The Institute for Labor Economics). He is also an affiliate of the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and of the Stanford Institute on Poverty and Inequality.
Holzer is an expert on the low-wage labor market, and has particularly studied the problems of Black workers in urban areas. He has authored or edited 12 books and several dozen journal articles, mostly on disadvantaged American workers and their employers, as well as on education and workforce issues and labor market policy. His books include Making College Work: Pathways to Success for Disadvantaged Students (2017, Brookings, with Sandy Baum), Where are All the Good Jobs Going? (2011, Russell Sage Foundation), Reconnecting Disadvantaged Young Men (2006, Urban Institute Press, with Peter Edelman and Paul Offner), Moving Up or Moving On: Who Advances in the Low Wage Labor Market? (2005, Russell Sage Foundation, with Fredrik Andersson and Julia Lane) and What Employers Want: Job Prospects for Less-Educated Workers (1996,Russell Sage Foundation.)
His work has contributed to state and federal policies in a number of policy areas. For instance, his research on the difficulties faced by ex-offenders in the job market contributed to a range of policies including the First Step Act of 2018; he advised the Obama administration on the inclusion of employment and training initiatives in the American Recovery and Reconstruction Act (ARRA, or the stimulus bill) of 2009 and on the vice president’s “job-driven training” initiative in 2014; and his research on Black employment problems and Affirmative Action has been cited in Supreme Court opinions on Affirmative Action. Holzer's research on the costs to the US economy of child poverty (in 2007) was instrumental in getting the Biden administration to expand the Child Tax Credit and reducing child poverty in their economic stimulus plan.
He received his BA from Harvard in 1978 (graduating Summa Cum Laude) and his Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard in 1983. He has been the recipient of the Leslie Whittington Faculty of the Year Award at the McCourt School (known earlier as the Georgetown Public Policy Institute) in 2002 and the Hamilton Project Policy Innovation Prize in 2011 at the Brookings Institution. He has served on the boards of directors at the Economic Mobility Corporation and the National Skills Coalition, and on the editorial board of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. Holzer also served on a recent National Academies of Science panel that generated a report on how to reduce intergenerational poverty in the US, and another on how federal tax credits can be used to reduce child poverty.