Prof. Thomas Lemieux
Congratulations to Professor Thomas Lemieux, recipient of a 2014 Bank of Canada Fellowship Award. Professor Lemieux is recognized internationally as an influential labour economist. His current research focuses on exploiting regional variation within countries to answer a number of important questions connected to unemployment and the evolution of wage inequality.
“The Bank of Canada is delighted to present the Fellowship Award to Professor Lemieux, a truly creative researcher and a world leader in the study of labour markets and wage inequality,” said Stephen S. Poloz, Governor of the Bank of Canada. “His name is already a fixture in labour economics textbooks, and his current research agenda will continue to address some of today’s most important and topical issues in economics and public policy.”
The Bank of Canada’s Fellowship Program is designed to encourage leading-edge research and the development of expertise in Canada in a number of areas critical to the Bank’s mandate: macroeconomics, monetary economics and international finance, as well as the economics of financial markets and institutions, including their financial stability. Professor Lemieux joins the growing list of Vancouver School of Economics faculty who have been honoured as Bank of Canada Research Fellows (Professors Paul Beaudry and Michael Devereux have already been honoured with the award).
Faculty from the VSE have also won the Bank of Canada’s Governor’s Award, created in 2008 to recognize and support the leading junior macroeconomist in Canada. The inaugural award went to Associate Professor Henry Siu, and Associate Professor Francesco Trebbi won the award in 2012.
Biography: Professor Thomas Lemieux
Thomas Lemieux is currently a Professor of Economics at the University of British Columbia’s Vancouver School of Economics. Prior to that, he was an Associate Professor of Economics from 1995 to 1999 and an Assistant Professor of Economics from 1992 to 1995 at Université de Montréal. His first academic position was in the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Since 1998 and 1994, respectively, Professor Lemieux has also been a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and an Associated Fellow at Centre interuniversitaire de recherche en analyse des organisations (CIRANO).
Professor Lemieux is recognized internationally as an influential labour economist. He has written extensively on labour markets and earnings inequality in Canada, the United States and many other countries. He has made major technical contributions to the methodology of empirical research in labour economics and is widely credited as the leading authority on decomposition methods in this field. His current research focuses on exploiting regional variation within countries to answer a number of important questions connected to unemployment and the evolution of wage inequality in the aftermath of the Great Recession.
Professor Lemieux is a fellow at the Royal Society of Canada and the Society of Labor Economists. He is currently serving as President of the Canadian Economics Association, which awarded him the Rae Prize for outstanding research in 1998. Professor Lemieux has also been very active in disseminating his research, presenting at hundreds of conferences, workshops and seminars over the course of his career. During the 2012–13 academic year, he visited more than twenty-five prominent academic institutions, including the University of Chicago (Becker Friedman Institute), Yale University, Harvard University (Lab for Economic Applications and Policy), University College London (Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration) and University of California at Berkeley (Center for Labor Economics). He is a founding Co-Editor of the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics.
Born in Québec City, Professor Lemieux holds a BA in economics from Université Laval (1984), an MA in economics from Queen’s University (1985) and a PhD in economics from Princeton University (1989).