People
John Bound
George E Johnson Collegiate Professor Emeritus of Economics, Professor Emeritus of Economics, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts and Research Professor Emeritus, Population Studies Center, Institute for Social Research
Research Interests:
Professor Bound is an empirically oriented labor economist. Much of Bound’s research has focused on the effect of health on the labor force behavior of older working-aged men and women with a focus on the effects of the U.S. Social Security Disability Program on the behavior and economic well-being of working aged individuals. He has worked on the reliability and validity of survey measures of health and was an early contributor to the research showing disability declines among the elderly.
In other work, Bound contributed to the evidence that an important influence on the demand for skilled labor within the U.S. is technological change. Much of his recent work has focused on higher education in the U.S. and on the impact of high skilled immigration into the U.S. on U.S. competitiveness and on educational and labor force outcomes for U.S. natives.
In addition, in collaboration with Arline Geronimus, he has written a significant number of papers on black-white differences in health outcomes. Along with his substantive work, Bound has made a number of methodological contributions, including influential work on weak instruments and on measurement error in survey data. He is an elected fellow of the Econometric Society and the Society for Labor Economists and in 2025 received the Jacob Mincer Award from the Society of Labor Economists to recognize his lifetime achievements in the field of labor economics
Along with his affiliation with the Population Studies Center, he is an emeritus professor in the Department of Economics and is a Faculty Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), affiliated with the Labor Studies, and Education and Aging programs.
Select Publications
- Arline T Geronimus, Waidmann, Timothy A, John Bound, Pancini, Vincent, Yang,Meifeng. 2025. Long-term Economic Distress and Growing Educational Inequity in Life Expectancy. Epidemiology 36(3):287-296.
- Geronimus,Arline T, Bound,John, Waidmann, Timothy A, Rodriguez, Javier M, Timpe, Brenden . 2019. Weathering, Drugs, and Whack-a-Mole: Fundamental and Proximate Causes of Widening Educational Inequity in U.S. Life Expectancy by Sex and Race, 1990-2015. Journal of Health and Social Behavior 60(2):222-239.
- Bound,John, Khanna, Gaurav , Morales, Nicolas . 2018. Impact of the H-1B Program on the United States. High-Skilled Migration to the United States and Its Economic Consequences
- Bound,John, Khanna, Gaurav , Morales, Nicolas . 2017. Reservoir of foreign talent. Science 356(6339):697.
- Bound,John, Geronimus,Arline T, Rodriguez, Javier M, Waidmann, Timothy A. 2016. US Life Expectancy: The Authors Reply. Health Affairs 35(3)
- Geronimus,Arline T, Bound,John, Ro, A Eun Young, Griffith, Derek , Gee, Gilbert . 2016. Educational gradients in five Asian immigrant populations: Do country of origin, duration and generational status moderate the education-health relationship?. Preventive Medicine Reports 4:338-343. PMCID: PMC4963251.
- Bound,John, Geronimus,Arline T, Rodriguez, Javier , Waidmann, Timothy A. 2015. Measuring Recent Apparent Declines In Longevity: The Role Of Increasing Educational Attainment. Health Affairs 34(12):2167-2173. PMCID: PMC4783133.
- Bound,John, Demirci, Murat , Khanna, Gaurav , Turner, Sarah E. 2015. Finishing degrees and finding jobs: US higher education and the flow of foreign it workers. Innovation Policy and the Economy 15(1):27-72.
- Bound,John, Braga, Breno , Golden, Joseph , Khanna, Gaurav . 2015. Recruitment of Foreigners in the Market for Computer Scientists in the United States. Journal of Labor Economics 33(S1):S187-S223. PMCID: PMC4860810.
- Geronimus,Arline T, Bound,John, Rodriguez, Javier , Dorling, Danny . 2015. Black lives matter: Differential mortality and the racial composition of the U.S. electorate, 1970-2004. Social Science and Medicine 136-137:190-192. PMCID: PMC4465208.