Lucie Schmidt
Professor, Williams College
Lucie Schmidt is an Professor in the Department of Economics at Williams College. Professor Schmidt’s research to date has concentrated on two primary areas: 1) the economics of marriage and fertility decisions, and 2) examining costs and benefits of various social insurance programs. Her work in the area of marriage and fertility decisions includes a dynamic search model of the marriage market that explains nonmarital childbearing among college-educated women. In subsequent work she has analyzed the effects of heterogeneous risk preferences and imperfect fertility control on marriage and fertility timing, and has also examined the effects of state-level legislation mandating insurance coverage of infertility treatment. Her work on social insurance programs has included an examination of whether efforts to reform the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program led to an increase in caseloads for another means-tested program, Supplemental Security Income (SSI); a paper providing evidence on how labor markets for low-skill women are affected by various changes to social welfare programs, including AFDC and the Earned Income Tax Credit; and an analysis of the costs and the benefits of a marginal increase in Disability Insurance program generosity. She has also written on the relationship between gender, marriage, and asset accumulation in the United States. She received her Ph.D. (2003) and M.A. (1997) degrees in Economics from the University of Michigan, and received an A.B. (1992) in Government from Smith College.