Kevin Lang
e-mail: (lang@bu.edu)
264 Bay State Road, Room 302A
Department of Economics
Boston University
617-353-5694





Biographical Sketch (click here for a complete CV)

Education: I received my BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE)from Oxford University, my MSc in economics from the University of Montreal, and my PhD in economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Academic: I am presently a professor and chair of the Department of Economics at Boston University. I am also a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Center for Research and Analysis of Migration (University College, London) and a Fellow of the Center for the Study of Poverty and Inequality (Stanford University), and have for many years been a member of the Advisory Board of the Canadian Employment Research Forum. I am a co-editor of Labor Economics, the Journal of the European Association of Labor Economists. Until recently, I was an editor (with Paula England and George Farkas) of the monograph series Sociology and Economics: Controversy and Integration published by Aldine de Gruyter. Before coming to BU, I spent a year at the NBER as an Olin Foundation Fellow and before that was an assistant professor at the University of California, Irvine. During my tenure at Boston University, I have twice visited MIT for a year, once as a visiting scholar and once as a visiting professor. I spent three months at the New Zealand Institute of Economic Research on a Fullbright Fellowship. I was the recipient of a Sloan Foundation Faculty Research Fellowship.

Consulting: I do relatively little consulting since I prefer to focus on my research and teaching and on my civic activities (see below). When I do consult, I generally prefer projects that are likely to lead to academic publication. Over the years, I have consulted on a variety of projects including the intake dispositions of juvenile offenders (leading to publications in Journal of Research on Crime and Delinquency and the Journal of Public Economics), for the World Bank on the labor market in Sri Lanka (leading to a publication in the Journal of Development Studies) and on various projects related to health, none of which has generated any publications as yet. I have also served as an expert witness or consultant to legal counsel on various cases related to lead exposure and to discrimination.

Civic Activities: I live in Brookline, Massachusetts near JFK's birthplace. In 1992 I was elected to Town Meeting and a year later was chosen to co-chair the Financial Planning Advisory Committee (FPAC), a blue-ribbon commission that reviewed the town's financial and administrative structures. FPAC recommended a Proposition 2½ override, and I helped run the override campaign. That experience spurred me to study the economic effect of Proposition 2½ (see papers below). In 1994, I supported and helped run a debt exclusion campaign to renovate Brookline High School. Eighteen months later, I ran successfully for School Committee (what most of the rest of the country calls the School Board or Board of Education) and was reelected in 1999. I am currently Chair of the Committee.

CareerOwl: Through my connections to the Canadian Employment Research Forum (see above), I have been peripherally involved in CareerOwl. www.CareerOwl.ca is a nonprofit employment information and e-recruiting site founded by Canadian university professors to help job-seekers and employers connect, conveniently and directly. The service is open to all, but has special features to facilitate recruiting for the highly qualified. Job-seekers pay nothing and retain full control over their information. All campus, volunteer, co-op and student internship jobs can be posted for free by calling 1-877-OWL-POST (1-877-695-7678) to arrange for this. Employers pay $25 per regular 8-week Canadian job ad, posted as widely or selectively as the employer chooses. Foreign jobs can also be posted, but cost more.

Teaching and Courses

Fall 2006:
EC325 (Poverty and Discrimination)
EC751 (Labor Economics) - first part of a two-part PhD-level sequence (first half of semester)

Research and Papers
My research focuses on the economics of labor markets and education, including such topics as discrimination, unemployment, the relation between education and earnings and the relation between housing prices, taxes and local services. I work on both theory and empirical work, and occasionally on theoretical econometrics of a very applied type.

Data

These are the data for Lang, K. and Zagorsky, J. "Does Growing Up with An Absent Parent Really Hurt?" Journal of Human Resources, 36 (Spring 2000).

The data are in STATA format. Click here to download.

Brookline Politics If you are looking for my re-election page from May 2005, you should go here

I co-chaired Brookline’s Community Preservation Act Advisory Committee. We recommended that a proposal to adopt the CPA be put on the November 2006 ballot. Town Meeting adopted that recommendation. The full report is here. A correction can be found here.

I few years ago, I analyzed a survey conducted by the Brookline Public School in collaboration with the Brookline Educators Association. The survey examined the effect of the MCAS (Massachusetts state tests) on teaching and learning in Brookline. To access a copy of the report, click here.