John Bound
George E. Johnson Collegiate Professor Emeritus of Economics, Professor Emeritus of Economics, Research Professor Emeritus, University of Michigan
John Bound received his PhD in economics from Harvard University in 1987. He has held an appointment in the Department of Economics at the University of Michigan since 1986, and is a faculty associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), affiliated with both the Labor Studies and Aging programs there, and was elected a fellow of the Econometric Society in 2004. Bound is one of the leading empirical researchers in labor economics. Dr. Bound studies economic, demographic, and policy influences on the labor force participation and health status of older people in the United States. His recent research has also included studies on racial differences in earnings, employment, and health and changes in the returns to higher education. His teaching centers on econometrics and labor economics. Much of Bound’s research has focused on the effect of health on the labor force behavior of older working-aged men and women. This work has been published in leading economic and gerontology journals. He has co-authored with Richard Burkhauser a chapter in the Handbook of Labor Economics on the labor market effects of the Social Security Administration’s (SSA’s) programs targeted at the disabled. Bound has previous experience working directly and indirectly with researchers at the SSA. He was a member of the Technical Advisory Board for Project Network and has collaborated with David Stapleton at the Lewin Group on the work they did on the growth of the Social Security’s disability programs for the SSA and the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, Department of Health and Human Services. Bound also has extensive experience working with pre- and post-doctoral fellows. In the 21 years Bound has been at Michigan, he has placed students at RAND, the Urban Institute, Yale, Stanford University, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of California at Davis, the University of Utah, the University of Virginia and the University of Western Ontario. Many of these students continue to work on issues relating to health and retirement. He is currently devoting much of his research time to work, funded by the National Institute on Aging, the Social Security Administration and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, that uses the HRS data to study the effect of health and changes in health on the behavior of men and women as they near normal retirement age.