Alan Krueger at the White House in Washington on Nov. 26, 2012.Kevin Lamarque/Reuters
Alan B. Krueger, who advised two U.S. presidents and helped lead economics toward a more scientific approach to research and policy-making, was found dead Saturday at his home in Princeton, N.J. He was 58.
The cause was suicide, according to a statement by his family released by Princeton University, where Mr. Krueger taught for more than three decades. Princeton police said they were called to the home Saturday morning and found Mr. Krueger unresponsive. He was declared dead at a hospital.
Mr. Krueger was an assistant secretary of the Treasury from 2009 to 2010, as U.S. president Barack Obama’s administration tried to lead the United States out of its worst recession since the Great Depression. He was later the chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers from 2011 to 2013.
From 1994 to 1995, he was the Labor Department’s chief economist under President Bill Clinton.
A labour economist by training, Mr. Krueger was part of a new wave of economists who pushed the field toward a more empirical mindset, with an emphasis on data rather than theory. He applied that approach broadly: to education, health care, labour markets and terrorism, and even to more lighthearted subjects such as the rising price of concert tickets. His latest book, due out in June, is on the economics of the music industry.
“He is certainly among the most – if not the most – significant labour economists and all-around empirical economists of the last three decades,” said Lawrence Katz, a Harvard economist and frequent collaborator. Mr. Krueger, he said, was one of a handful of researchers who “really changed the shape of economics and turned it into a more serious science.”
Mr. Krueger was perhaps best known for his work with Mr. Katz and another economist, David Card, in the early 1990s on the effects of the minimum wage. Standard economic thinking at the time held that raising the minimum wage would reduce employment for low-wage workers; Mr. Katz said that he and Mr. Krueger had expected to find the same. Instead, they found no effect on employment – a finding that remains in dispute but has proved influential.
“Even when people were saying you’re crazy as an economist, he was really willing to let the data lead where it went,” Mr. Katz said.
Mr. Krueger was a young, newly tenured professor in 1994 when he was tapped by the secretary of labour, Robert B. Reich, to serve as chief economist for the department, succeeding Mr. Katz. After two years in the job, Mr. Krueger returned to Princeton and vowed never to return to government, according to a 2014 profile in a Princeton alumni magazine.
But in late 2008, Mr. Krueger got a call from Timothy F. Geithner, Mr. Obama’s pick for U.S. Treasury secretary. As Mr. Krueger recalled it in the magazine profile, Mr. Geithner said: “The economy’s in a free fall. Why don’t you come to Treasury and work on big, consequential things?”
“That was his line,” Mr. Krueger said. “And I couldn’t say no.”
Mr. Krueger spent two years at Treasury as chief economist and assistant secretary for economic policy. Then, after a brief return to Princeton, he went back to Washington as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, where he pushed the administration to focus on issues of inequality and economic opportunity.
While at the White House, he developed and popularized the “Great Gatsby curve,” the notion that countries with greater inequality had lower economic mobility from generation to generation.
In a statement Monday, Mr. Obama praised Mr. Krueger as “someone who was deeper than numbers on a screen or charts on a page.”
“He had a perpetual smile and a gentle spirit – even when he was correcting you,” Mr. Obama said.
Alan Bennett Krueger was born Sept. 17, 1960, in Livingston, N.J., less than 80 kilometres from the university where he would make his professional home. His father, Norman, was an accountant; his mother, Rhoda, taught first grade.
Mr. Krueger attended Cornell University intending to become a lawyer. But while analyzing data for an undergraduate research paper, he found that he enjoyed empirical work. After graduating from Cornell in 1985, he pursued a degree in economics at Harvard University, where he earned a doctorate in 1987.
Mr. Krueger’s more recent work focused on the structural reasons particular groups have struggled in the modern economy. He studied the effects of long-term unemployment in the wake of the recession and how the opioid epidemic has pushed some workers, particularly men, out of the labour force.
He also helped bring attention to companies’ use of noncompete agreements with employees as a means of holding down wages, and to occupational licensing rules as an obstacle to workers seeking better-paying careers. He proposed new rules to protect workers in the so-called gig economy, and just last week delivered a lecture at Stanford University on proposals for a universal basic income.
“Economics is a social science, and Alan was someone who was really interested in the social part of it as well as the science part of it,” said Betsey Stevenson, a University of Michigan economist. “He wanted to understand how people were doing, how people were feeling.”
Mr. Krueger served in Democratic administrations, and his research tended to support liberal causes. But Ms. Stevenson noted that his work on occupational licensing had been influential among conservatives as well. And he was willing to reach conclusions that did not align with his policy preferences; in one such instance, his research found that poverty did not cause terrorism.
His leaves his wife, Lisa Simon Krueger, and his children, Ben and Sydney. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.