Patrick Kline Explained

Patrick McGraw Kline
Education:	B.A. (1999), Reed College M.P.P. (2001), Ph.D. (2007) University of Michigan
Workplaces:	University of California, Berkeley

Patrick McGraw Kline is an U.S. American economist and Professor of Economics of the University of California at Berkeley.^[1] In 2018, his research was awarded the Sherwin Rosen Prize by the Society of Labor Economists for "outstanding contributions in the field of labor economics".^[2] In 2020, he was awarded the prestigious IZA Young Labor Economist Award.

Biography

Patrick Kline earned B.A. in political science from Reed College in 1999, followed by an MPP from the Ford School of Public Policy and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 2001 and 2007, respectively.^[3] During his Ph.D., Kline briefly worked as an assistant professor at Yale University (2007–08), after which he moved to the University of California at Berkeley, where he was promoted to associate professor in 2015 and full professor in 2018. Kline is affiliated with the National Bureau of Economic Research and the International Growth Centre. In terms of professional service, Kline performs editorial duties for the journals Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy, Review of Economic Studies, and .

Research

Patrick Kline's research interests include labor economics, urban economics and econometrics.^[4] According to IDEAS/RePEc, Kline belongs to the top 2% of economists in terms of research output.^[5] Key results of his research include the following:

• Finding intergenerational economic mobility to vary substantially across the United States, Kline, Emmanuel Saez, Raj Chetty and Nathaniel Hendren identify (i) residential segregation, (ii) income inequality, (iii) low primary school quality, (iv) low social capital, and (v) low family stability as key characteristics of areas with low mobility.^[6] Overall, while they conclude that mobility has remained stable over time, they highlight that some areas in the U.S. have persistently offered less mobility than most other developed countries.^[7]
• Kline, David Card and Jörg Heining argue that the rise in West German wage inequality is due to a combination of growing differences between workers, stronger dispersion between the wage premia paid by different firms, and an increased tendency of high-ability workers to sort into high-premium paying establishments.^[8] In further work on wage inequality with Card and Ana Rute Cardoso, Kline finds evidence that gender differences in terms of workplace bargaining and sorting – e.g. men sorting themselves into firms with higher wage premia and women earning smaller wage premia than men within the same firm – account for about 20% of the gender wage gap in Portugal.^[9] Along with Heining, they further argue that firm-level drivers of wage inequality can be explained through workers' individual tastes for different workplaces.^[10]
• Evaluating a programme of U.S. empowerment zones (EZ), Kline, Matias Busso and Jesse Gregory find that EZ designation substantially raised employment and real wages in zone neighborhoods at modest efficiency costs.^[11] In another example of a local economic development programme, together with Enrico Moretti, Kline studies the impact of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA); they find that the programme helped foster infrastructure improvements that yielded long-growing gains in manufacturing employment and raised U.S. manufacturing productivity though local agglomeration gains seem to cancel out with losses in the rest of the U.S.^[12] Overall, Kline and Moretti have argued that "place-based policies have the potential to profoundly affect the location of economic activity, along with the wages, employment, and industry mix of communities".^[13]

Honours and awards

• W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research: Dissertation Award (2007)
• American Economic Review: Excellence in Refereeing Award (2015/16/17)
• Society of Labor Economists: Sherwin Rosen Prize (2018)

External links

• Faculty profile of Patrick Kline on the website of UC-Berkeley
• Personal webpage of Patrick Kline on the website of UC-Berkeley
• Google Scholar page of Patrick Kline

Notes and References

1. https://www.econ.berkeley.edu/faculty/827 Faculty profile of Patrick Kline on the website of UC-Berkeley.
2. https://sole-jole.org/Rosen2018.html 2018 Sherwin Rosen Prize award to Patrick Kline. Retrieved July 20, 2019.
3. https://eml.berkeley.edu/~pkline/CV.pdf Curriculum vitae of Patrick Kline on the website of UC-Berkeley. Retrieved July 20, 2019.
4. https://www.econ.berkeley.edu/faculty/827 Faculty profile of Patrick Kline on the website of UC-Berkeley. Retrieved July 20, 2019.
5. https://ideas.repec.org/top/top.person.all.html#pkl131 Patrick Kline ranks 1039th out of 56344 economists registered on IDEAS/RePEc. Retrieved July 20, 2019.
6. https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/129/4/1553/1853754 Chetty, R. et al. (2014). Where is the land of opportunity? The geography of intergenerational mobility in the United States. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 129(4), pp. 1553-1623.
7. https://www.jstor.org/stable/42920926 Chetty, R. et al. (2013). Is the United States still a land of opportunity? Recent trends in intergenerational mobility. American Economic Review: Papers & Proceedings, 104(5), pp. 141–147.
8. https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/128/3/967/1848785?redirectedFrom=fulltext Card, D., Heining, J., Kline, P. (2013). Workplace heterogeneity and the rise of West German wage inequality. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 128(3), pp. 967–1015.
9. Card, D., Cardoso, A.R., Kline, P. (2015). Bargaining, sorting, and the gender wage gap: Quantifying the impact of firms on the relative pay of women. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 131(2), pp. 633–686.
10. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/694153 Card, D. et al. (2018). Firms and labor market inequality: Evidence and some theory. Journal of Labor Economics, 36(S1), pp. S13–S70.
11. Busso, M., Gregory, J., Kline, P. (2013). Assessing the incidence and efficiency of a prominent place based policy. American Economic Review, 103(2), pp. 897–947.
12. https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/129/1/275/1899702?redirectedFrom=PDF Kline, P., Moretti, E. (2013). Local economic development, agglomeration economies, and the Big Push: 100 years of evidence from the Tennessee Valley Authority. Quarterly Journal of Economics, 129(1), pp. 275–331.
13. https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-economics-080213-041024 Kline, P., Moretti, E. (2014). People, places, and public policy: Some simple welfare economics of local economic development programs. Annual Review of Economics, 6, pp. 629–662.