Robert A. Moffitt

Professor Robert A. Moffitt is the Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Economics at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland. He has conducted empirical research on public programs and has contributed definitive studies of the disincentive effects of the U.S. welfare system and the effects of welfare reform on participants and their children. Professor Moffitt has analyzed the effect of stigma on participation in welfare programs and investigated the effects of taxes on labor supply; the high implicit tax rates on the poor under the current social welfare system; the effects of benefit exhaustion on unemployment; and the economics of in-kind benefits. He has studied the political economy of the welfare system and developed various econometric tools in the course of his empirical work. In a parametric setting, he developed the concept of the marginal treatment effect, which is the basis for interpreting instrumental variables in the presence of heterogeneous treatment effects and for unifying the treatment effect literature. Moffitt has contributed research on decomposing the growth of income inequality into increases in permanent and transitory components, and wrote influential papers on economic demography. Additionally, he served as Chief Editor of the American Economic Review and is responsible for revitalizing the Journal of Human Resources.